Behind the unexciting title (which references a test Alan Turing developed to distinguish machines from humans) director Morten Tyldum has created a 114 minute film that manages to make maths exciting. Teachers around the country will be hoping for renewed interest in their maths lessons after the release of The Imitation Game in which Benedict Cumberbatch plays mathematician Alan Turing, the inventor of the forerunner of the computer.
We all know the outcome of the war and enough about film-financing to realise that The Imitation Game wouldn’t have been made if Turing had eventually had to give up his research and say sorry chaps, my machine didn’t work. Which makes it even more remarkable that the film keeps a high level of suspense for most of its length.
As with all biopics what is fact and what fiction is unclear. The film is set in three time periods. We see Turing’s difficult, bullied schooldays and his post-war arrest for gross indecency. But most of the film follows the top-secret events at Bletchley Radio Maufacturing, where hyper-intelligent Turing is not involved in the manufacture of radios.
During WWII the allies are having no problem intercepting encrypted German radio communications, but they are unable to break the code. And there isn’t just one code – everyday day it is changed and the work has to start again. Even though they have got their hands on an Enigma machine (which the Germans use to read the messages), there are 150 million, million, million possible combinations to check through every day. All the Allied intelligence agencies think it is uncrackable, though if the code can be broken the nazi plans will be readable, lives will be saved and the war shortened.
There are no visual or audio recordings of Turing in existence, so Cumberbatch is able to work with a blank canvas. He excels, playing him as aloof, awkward, uncaring and extremely hard to get along with. The only person whose intelligence he repects is Keira Knightley’s Joan Clarke, who struggles with her parents to be allowed to join the top-secret programme. For security reasons they are not told the truth, so unsurprisingly they don’t see the importance of their girl moving miles away to work in a radio factory.
Visually the film’s colours feel as though they have been rationed which works well for the war years. Less successful are the occasional shots of warfare or aircraft which are rather too unrealistic.
Making excitement out of waiting for a big machine to spit out results can’t have been easy but Tyldum has managed it. A tighter film would have concentrated on the Bletchley code cracking – once the war is won the remainder feels like an extraneous coda, added to complete Turing’s story though not relevant to the Bletchley Park success. The film isn’t quite decided whether it is focused on Turing’s life or Bletchley Park and at the end the scope is widened still further as a the broader picture of life for homosexuals at the time is referenced in a final title.
Verdict: Carefully engineered suspense, even if you know who won the war.
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