A twenty-first century political fable unrelated to Alan Turing

Rating: 6/10 (5 January 2015)

This film, while entertaining, aims mainly to be a purely twenty-first century anti-bullying parable, regardless of the historical truth about Alan Turing. While I have been more firmly opposed than most to boarding school bullying, in this case, the nobler the goal, the worse the writing. The film tries unsuccessfully to make Turing both a friendless quasi-autistic lone genius, and the head of the entire decryption project; neither point has any relation to reality, and barely cohere to each other. (I admit to some bitterness about this slur on my grand- supervisor, since it implicitly denies the existence of my graduate-school supervisor.)
The film also does disservice to Joan Clarke's genuine contributions, substituting a muddled and completely ahistorical subplot about her professional dependence on, and mathematical superiority to, Turing, while seeming more concerned with her appearance than her intellect.