Almost worthless biopic of a true genius. Fine production values are the main thing to recommend in this.

Rating: 2/10 (7 February 2015)

If you see this picture without prior knowledge of Alan Turing's life, there is some probability that you might like this (otherwise, I can't explain its high ratings here or its raving reviews), but anyone familiar with the life of this remarkable individual will rightly see this movie as a travesty.
But first let me put forward some good things to say about this movie: there are some fine production values, there is some fine acting here (especially by Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing) and a good, if flashy direction (by Norway's Morten Tildum). But they all struggle against a worthless screenplay. This is the worst screenplay I have ever seen put into a movie (and I have seen hundreds of movies, having reviewed almost 500 in IMDb). Worthy of a pretentious high school student, it is a mixture of ludicrous melodramatics and historical illiteracy.
The movie give us a rough, true outline of Turing's life (brilliant mathematician, computer pioneer, very nerdy personality, helped break Germany's Enigma machine codes during the war, which proved very important in the battle of the Atlantic facing English ships against Germany's submarines, his career crashes dramatically in 1952 when after a burglary in his house police finds he is a homosexual, which was a criminal offense in Britain until 1967, forced by a judge to take hormone therapy in order to avoid prison).
But alongside this true outline a lot of falsities are added. Just to mention a few of these falsehoods, without being exhaustive: 1) the movie never tells that it was the Poles before the War who first constructed a machine that was able to break Enigma. Turing and his team (not just him) did build an upgraded machine that was able to crack an upgraded Enigma, 2) Turing's military superiors - personified here by commander Denniston (Charles Dance) – hate Turing so much that they threaten to fire him, charge him as a spy or destroy his code breaking machine. Turing avoid their threats by appealing directly to Churchill. In reality, Turing did appeal to Churchill successfully for a higher budget for his outfit, but the relationship between him and his immediate superiors was nowhere near as bad as the movie shows, 3) when Turing was arrested after the war for homosexuality, there was never any suspicion by the authorities that he might be a Soviet spy.
In the phoniest scene in the movie, Turing and his coworkers decide not to tell their superiors that they have finally cracked Enigma, since they are afraid that if Germany realizes that the code has been broken, they then will switch it to a harder code. This is made despite the tearful pleadings of one of the code breakers whose brother happens to be in a ship about to be taken down by German submarines. Decisions like this were actually made during the war, but they were taken at the highest military and political level, not by the cryptoanalysts.
In the most ridiculous scene in the movie: Turing realizes that one of his fellow code breakers, named John Cairncross (played by Allen Leech), is a Soviet spy. He discovers this when he see he has a bible with a passage marked that has been used in a message by a mole. Cairncross tells Turing that if he blows his cover, he will tell Turing's superiors that he is homosexual, and Turing gives in to this blackmail. There was actually a Soviet mole named John Cairncross in Bletchley Park, Britain's wartime code breaking facility, but he never worked alongside Turing, and might never have met him.
Turing was a remarkable figure, a scientific genius, a privately tormented person, who also did extremely valuable work during World War II. It is sad that his story is finally brought to screen (after so many decades) through such a terrible movie. The real story of Turing and the decipherment of the Enigma machine can be found in many places, either in books, TV documentaries or in the Internet. I suggest a fine book by Simon Singh called "The Code Book".
Also with Keira Knightley, who plays a codebreaker who was for a time engaged to Turing - this was actually true.