I had heard of Enigma, the machine the Germans used for transmitting unbreakable coded messages during World War II, and the codebreakers working to unlock its secrets and end the war. I had heard of Alan Turing, but didn't connect him to Enigma.
The Imitation Game works on two very interesting levels:
- An account of Turing and his team's efforts to break the Enigma machine (an effort that was only de-classified more than 50 years after the fact)
- A condemnation of close-minded thinking that marginalizes people, even those extraordinary ones who change history, and save lives--the "greatest generation" indeed.
Turing is just another man on the team led by Hugh (Matthew Goode), and Turing believes he needs a machine to beat the Enigma machine. The Germans code their messages, and the receiver of those messages uses the Enigma machine--set to the specific setting that changes every day--to decode the message. The problem is there are over 159 million million (basically, 159 followed by 18 zeroes!) possible settings, so a small unit of men has no chance of running all the settings in the 18 hours they have before the setting changes again--hence the need for a machine that can run those possibilities and spit out the setting that will unlock the messages.
No one believes in Alan's machine, an issue further complicated by the fact that Alan is a borderline autistic savant, who doesn't get jokes and social niceties. After Alan appeals to Churchill himself, he becomes head of the project, and needs new cryptologists, A crossword puzzle test in the newspaper brings out candidates, among them a woman, Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley). If Turing is dismissed for being odd, Joan is dismissed for simply being a woman in 1940's England. But she is very talented, and Alan takes a shine to her, and she joins his team.
Meanwhile the war rages on, London bombed into rubble, people starving, soldiers dying, and the military growing weary of Turing's belief in his "machine" and the lack of results. The Imitation Game is about secrets upon secrets--the top secret codebreaking team, the possible Soviet double agent in their midst, Joan hiding what she is doing from her disapproving and traditional parents, the MI6 agent Stewart Menzies (Mark Strong) lurking about, and Alan hiding his true self--he is gay, which is illegal in England.
The film moves between the 1940's and the effort to break Enigma, Alan's years as a child in school (bullied of course), and 1951, when the police investigate a robbery at Alan's home, which leads to his greatest secret being uncovered.
The film--directed with invisible urgency by Morton Tyldum and well-written (if occasionally on the nose) by Graham Moore--is a rich experience, a look into secret history, and a time that seems very foreign to us in our more enlightened age. The scene where the team stumbles into a way to break Enigma is one of my favorite scenes of the year, and the third act is full of one interesting turn after another.
The supporting cast is excellent, with Dance, Goode and Strong doing their usual outstanding work. But the film belongs to Cumberbatch (whom has played this type of barely social genius before) and Knightley (she gives one great performance after another, it seems.)
I defy you not to be a little outraged and sad by the end of the film, as Turing was not only a war hero, his machine also led to the modern computer, and what happens to him is cruel and unforgivable. Much of the film is about how we marginalize those that are different than us, and how we (as a civilization) may deny people their lives and contributions because they are not what we want or expect. As such, an undercurrent of anger and melancholy runs under this historical story, that tells us in no uncertain terms that we have come far, but we should never forget how much better we could treat--and empathize with--all people.
Grade: "A"
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