In 1939, during WWII, Britain declared war on Nazi Germany. The Germans possessed a cipher devise with which they could send and receive top secret coded messages. The machine was called Enigma. Enigma was purported to be uncrackable. The British government manages to get their hands on one of the devices; however, they don’t know how to decipher the messages without the secret cipher key. Britain puts together a team of cryptographers, linguists and mathematicians to try to crack the Enigma code and operate the machine. One of the men tapped to work on the problem is Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch), a brilliant mathematician and computer scientist. Alan wants to build a machine to help decipher Enigma.
The team is under the jurisdiction of Commander Denniston (Charles Dance). Denniston, who takes an instant dislike to Alan, refuses to authorize the money needed to build the machine. Alan goes over Denniston’s head and manages to get himself named head of the team. He promptly fires two of the members since he doesn’t believe their expertise would help the assignment. To find new members he devises a complicated crossword puzzle designed to test people and find replacements. The other members of the team were Hugh Alexander (Matthew Goode), John Cairncross (Allen Leech) and Peter Hilton (Matthew Beard). He then hires Jack Good (James Northcote).
Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley) is one of the people who completed the crossword correctly. Alan wants to hire her but her parents don’t want her working with men. Alan tells her parents that she would be working in the women’s area where they copy down messages that were intercepted. She works with Alan on the side. Once Alan’s machine, which he calls Christopher after his childhood friend, is up and running the team still needs to find a key that Alan’s machine can use to decode the German messages. A chance comment from Helen (Tuppence Middleton), one of Joan’s co-workers, brings about the exact words that Alan needed to crack the code. The words were Heil Hitler.
“The Imitation Game” was released in 2014 and was directed by Morten Tyldum. It is a British biographical drama thriller.
I was hoping to see mostly historical information on Enigma and how the British cracked the code, and there was some of that here. Unfortunately the movie ended up being more of a tragedy than documentary. A lot of liberties were taken. The list of inaccuracies in reflecting historic events is long. It might be a good idea to look at the film as a Hollywood movie and not as a documentary style film. I suppose I was looking for a happy ending of some kind. I was disappointed.
Turing was a homosexual. In 1952 he was arrested and convicted of “gross indecency” and had to submit to chemical castration to stay out of prison. This sent Turing into a downward spiral that eventually ended in his committing suicide in 1954.
The movie was good and I enjoyed most of it, but the film left me feeling disappointed in the human race. This is another reason to hate politics. Everything is fine while they need you, but as soon as your usefulness is over, you’re done. Turing’s contribution to the project and analytical insights did more than just shorten WWII. That Youtube algorithm that sends videos to your feed was created based on concepts developed by Turing. He is considered by many to be the father of computer science.
In 2013 Queen Elizabeth II granted Turing a posthumous pardon.