Pointless and small-time movie which is more of an insult than a tribute.

Rating: Null/10 (20 May 2019)

The Imitation Game is an extremely watered down and edited version of events made for a middle of the road, mainstream 2010s audience.
Given that it has Benedict Cumberbatch in it, I avoided it like the plague when it came out. By the time I came to watch it on TV I had kind of forgotten about how dull the overhyped "Sherlock" was and I have always been fascinated by both the legend of Turing, and the war itself obviously, I was open minded about it.
The simple fact is, he may have been "odd" but by the time Alan Turing had reached Bletchley Park he was a confident young man. He was not half way to being Rain Man like this movie wants you to think. And what's more, even though his sexuality was still outlawed and oppressed in Britain, he was open to his colleagues at the code-breaking facility. He was not awkward about his sexuality and he didn't hate himself or seek a woman to both act as a beard and take "pity" on him or something.
The early 40s was a time of total war, many people in Britain, especially those smart enough to be doing this kind of job, were afraid that the country was finished. Hitler had spent most of the last decade arming Germany to take on the world while Britain had slept and engaged in futile appeasement. The underdogs weren't stupid enough to take one of their best players off the field just because he liked other dudes.
And given his talents, he probably would have been more like a god to his colleagues, not an outcast.
If it's not really doable to make a big-grossing, "marketable" mainstream movie about a nerdy gay number genius that's fine but what the hell is the point of churning out a movie where WW2 was nearly lost by the Allies because Turing didn't know how to accept a lunch invite from his fellow math-nerds (who, by the way, all swagger around like jocks.).... and where one of the greatest technical minds of the 20th century had to justify his war-winning project to some goon from the Ministry of Kicking Down Barn Doors.
If that's an "amazing" film to you, well I'm afraid my words to you will have to be um... watered down too.
The only vaguely compelling part was when they realised that they couldn't use the cracked German code to stop or foil every attack, or the Germans would soon realise what had happened and change the code. This meant they had to give up the lives of their countrymen, out there in battlefields, for strategical purposes.
It seems to me to be part of a pattern of recent British films that, intentionally or not, trivialise some of Britain's most remarkable people, whether historical or recent. 2017 saw the release of "Darkest Hour" in which the famously determined, "bulldog"-like Winston Churchill (who was the posh son of an aristocrat) was depicted asking random yahoos on the tube whether the country should surrender to Hitler or not. Also Eddie Redmayne, who makes Cumberbatch look like the most versatile actor ever, "played" Stephen Hawking as though he was a wide-eyed simpleton who just accidentally managed to figure out all the universe's secrets by finding them in a Christmas cracker or something.
As a Turing fan site helpfully pointed out, this movie is more like an extended episode of Downton Abbey, than a tribute to a genius, but with a fresh new look into Britain's awkward and disturbing relationship with "intelligent" people, as well as its awkward relationship with its past.