The Imitation Game: An Unsung Hero

Alan Turing was a British computer scientist who is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science. He was a genius and a war hero, but owing to the classified nature of his work during World War II and the unjust treatment he received in the 50s after being prosecuted for homosexuality, he remained largely unknown to the British public. In recent years, there has been a growing movement to restore Turing to his rightful place in the British consciousness and The Imitation Game does an excellent job of bringing this man's story to the world.

The movie opens in 1952, when Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) is brought into police custody for some mysterious reason. His voiceover begins to tell his story and we are transported back to 1939, at the outbreak of World War II, when the young Turing arrives at Bletchley Park for a job interview. Despite a fractious conversation with Commander Alastair Denniston (Charles Dance), Turing is too intelligent to ignore and is hired to be a part of a team of cryptographers tasked with cracking the German Enigma code. The team consists of a group of men who are mostly trying to break the code by trial and error but Turing knows the only way to tackle Enigma is to develop a machine that can quickly go through the millions of permutations and break the new code every day. Therefore, he sets out to design a giant machine to solve this giant riddle. His team thinks he is insane and there is a great deal of friction among them, but when he hires the brilliant mathematician, Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), she becomes his guide to how to interact with his team and work together to save the world. 

The movie zigs and zags between time periods, alternating between Turing's boarding school years, his time at Bletchley, and his later years in Manchester. As the movie progresses, you see how screenwriter Graham Moore's script is cleverly weaving in elements from different times and giving us an insight into how this man's very complicated brain might work. The meat of the story is what transpires in Bletchley Park and Benedict Cumberbatch wholeheartedly steps into Turing's skin, bringing all of his intelligence and social awkwardness to bear. Knightley is a welcome addition to the male-dominated cast and is able to bring a much-needed dose of feminine intelligence and drive to the movie, even if she has no other women to talk to. Her struggles to be a career woman in this conservative era are on par with Turing's struggles to just get along with his peers and the two of them play marvelously off of each other and the rest of the cast. The other characters are rather stereotypical, but the actors playing them are excellent. You have Matthew Goode as the roguish Hugh Alexander, Allen Leech as the seemingly affable John Cairncross, and Mark Strong playing the macho and mysterious MI6 man in the shadows. It's a great British ensemble and while the dialogue sometimes get very predictable, it never stop being entertaining. 

The Imitation Game is a story about unconventional people that is told fairly conventionally by director Morten Tyldum. However, it is elevated by the engaging subject matter, the superb performances, and its ability to be funny, sympathetic, and devastating. The score by Alexandre Desplat is wonderful, a sort of digital symphony that captures the urgency and beauty of Turing's work as he races to crack Enigma and bring about an end to the war. While the script takes many historical liberties, it captures the broad strokes of this man's extraordinary life and the extraordinary team of people in Bletchley who may have helped save 14 million lives by cracking Enigma. After setting Turing up as the brilliant figure that he was, it is then heart-wrenching to view his eventual downfall as he is cruelly prosecuted for his homosexuality and eventually forgotten by the world. Thankfully, with this movie, he is being restored to his proper legacy and will remain forgotten no longer.