The Imitation Game / Rated PG-13 for war violence and adult themes and situations.
Benedict Cumberbatch (BBC’s Sherlock) does a great job portraying a distant relative in The Imitation Game. The title refers to an event in the film that remains yours to discover, not mine to tell you. The film tells the story in a back and forth style moving at random between 1928, 1939 at the end of WWII, and 1951. It was one of the greatest spy stories ever and concerns the race to find a way to break the code the German’s devised using the Enigma machine. It is insidious. Enigma had 159 million permutations and would take 20 million years to figure out the code. Since the German’s change the code at midnight every day it would take a lot of people to get the job done. The Brits only had 8.
Alan Turing (1912-1954) was the guy running the code breaking team. He was good at crossword puzzles and could add up numbers better than Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man (1988). Unfortunately there are spies in his midst and government officials who do not believe in him. AT figured out that since the team couldn’t solve the math, it would take another machine to beat the Enigma machine. So it’s heigh ho off to work they go. It’s obvious early in the film that AT is gay, but this fact doesn’t overwhelm the plot until very late in the story.
BC is as brilliant playing AT as AT was at numbers, machines and crossword puzzles. Of the eight people working with him one is a woman, which means she’s not exactly in the secretarial pool and was a no-no at that time. Keira Knightley’s character is easily the smartest of the group save AT and becomes a kind of love interest.
Meanwhile, the WW rages on with enormous numbers of deaths. The code machine has it’s up and downs. And it’s round and rounds. It makes clicks and pops and although it is the pure 1st digital computer it still runs faster without an operating system than Windows 95 ever did.
Due to his sexual proclivity and the cultural mores of the time, AT was persecuted and driven to a horrible end. He never received credit for what he and his team achieved. The film does a great job of blending the human stories and the pressure to solve the problem at hand so that the war can be shortened and save millions of lives. Of course it happened but the story of how it all came about makes for one of the best films of the year. Very much like the recently released The Theory of Everything but different. I was tempted to write this review in an indecipherable code (which my editor says has happened sometimes anyway). By now you probably wished I had so you could have quit reading. If I have kept you here long enough you should be persuaded to check out The Imitation Game. It’s for real.
Rated 3.9 out of 4.0 dash dash dot dot dot dash