Epic WWII storytelling done right!

Rating: 9/10 (10 January 2015)

This is a splendidly executed re-creation of the epic events that eventually led to Britain's almost continuous cracking of the top-secret daily machine settings of Germany's "Enigma" code throughout most of WWII, so that they could read and act upon the Wehrmacht's encrypted military messages. Determining those daily settings demanded the manipulation of massive amounts of mathematical data... an overwhelming task for the teams of mathematicians and cryptanalysts at the government's top-secret cypher center at Bletchley Park, north of London. The British had obtained a working copy of the German 'Enigma' machine... but it was a useless boat anchor without knowing the Germans' top-secret daily machine settings.
The protagonist is Cambridge mathematician Alan Turing (brilliantly portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch), who quickly determined that a computing device must be created to deal with the massive amounts of data that had to be manipulated daily to determine that day's machine settings. The film correctly focuses upon Turing's personal contributions to create the electromechanical computing machine (the "Bombe") that accomplished that task, how it helped to both win and significantly shorten the war, and on the unfortunate events that led eventually to his code breaking and life-saving achievements being disregarded by the British government.
IMHO, the film should've perhaps devoted more time to depict some of the fascinating wartime secrets revealed in advance by Turing's machine: such breathtaking top secrets as the locations throughout the Atlantic of Germany's U-boat wolfpacks, the German Wehrmacht's surprise invasion of The Soviet Union (22 June, 1941)... even the radio traffic of Luftwaffe fighters as they approached and shot down (actor/secret British envoy) Leslie Howard's aircraft on 1 June, 1943. It's a MUST-SEE flick--and one that you must follow attentively: missing a single line of dialogue can lead to your missing out on an important plot nuance or a gem of tongue-in-cheek humour.