Emotional and tense. Historical accuracy be damned; this movie works.

Rating: 9/10 (5 January 2015)

All I really knew going into "The Imitation Game" was that the poster made it look good, that Benedict Cumberbatch was playing the lead and that the movie was about Alan Turing, which many people consider the father of the modern computer. When I left, I was pleased with my experience not only because I "learned things" (I always take "based on a true story" with a grain of salt), but mostly I was pleased because it's a movie that got me thinking. I like turning my brain off to a dumb action movie as much as the next guy, but when a movie gets you to re-examine the world around you, that's something special. The film shows us Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) and his team of code-breakers' efforts to crack the Enigma Machine, an encoding device used by the Nazis during World War II. Turing is convinced that the previous efforts, all done by hand were more than fruitless, they were foolish. The only chance they have of cracking the codes and winning the war is to create a machine, one the likes of no one (at least no one in the 40's) has ever seen. The film follows the team's efforts as well as Turing's life before, and after the war.
This movie had me thinking a lot about the geniuses we've seen throughout history. Alan Turing (at least as portrayed in this movie) is a strange man, one that does not fit in particularly well with the rest of society at his time. He doesn't react to humour well, he is easily dismissive of others if they are doing things he doesn't agree with and he's not just dedicated to his work, he's obsessed with it. People don't like him instinctively because he's weird and that's a big hurdle he has to overcome because his code-breaking machine is a very expensive piece of equipment made to be in the service of military men, who are not particularly well known for their acceptance of wild ideas. I wondered, as the film progressed, how many geniuses throughout history were similarly ostracized or misunderstood. To make something new, something that no one else has ever thought of, you have to be a little bit off your mark, because you're thinking in a different way than everybody else is, right? Many visionaries must have felt profoundly lonely in their days because of the way society reacted to their eccentricities. What I really liked about the movie is that it put me right there, in Alan Turing's shoes as he struggled day in and day out to get his machine to work, desperately trying to make it to decipher code faster, to show to others that the machine he is putting together is not a waste of time and money. I'm not particularly computer literate, but even I could see that the machine he was working on was a dynamite idea. Every time someone came in and threatened to tear it apart, every time the machine failed to perform as it was supposed to, I was on the edge of my seat. I saw something that very few people in the movie could, that this guy was a genius and that you're not necessarily going to understand what someone that thinks outside the box is doing, but if you just give them time and space, you will get results.
Another aspect of the movie that I really enjoyed comes later in the movie, in Turing's life after the war. Without revealing what happens, it's one of those scenarios where you look back at people who were doing what was considered socially acceptable at the time, and you hate them. I understand that some of the behaviour at the time wasn't "wrong" by their standards, but I still found myself outraged and the words "barbarians" came to mind more than once. It got me wondering how our customs of today will be looked at in the future. Just as the generals and peers of Alan Turing dismissed him as a fool or a degenerate and we now look back and them with anger, will we be looked at by future generations as savages? The portion of the movie that dealt with the building of Turing's machine had me excited to see what would happen next. The segments that dealt with his life before and after WWII had my heart wrenching. I found myself becoming very emotional and I will admit that I cried a little bit at the end of the movie.
I wrote so much about what the movie meant to me emotionally that I almost didn't leave any room to talk about the technical aspects. Firstly, there are some dynamite performances here. Benedict Cumberbatch shines as he usually does, but I also thought that some of the secondary characters were very good. I hope that when people talk about what was good in this movie, they don't forget to mention Keira Knightley (who plays an underdog, just like Turing and had me equally captivated) and Mark Strong as Maj. Gen Stewart Menzies who brings in some harsh truths about war that devastated me. I can't think of anyone that was bad, so you'll have to forgive me if I don't list everyone here. I thought the ending of the film was particularly powerful, that the movie as a whole was very exciting (even if I kind of knew where the Enigma machine thing was going) and it actually had me thinking a lot about war as a whole, about how it affects people in the service of the army in so many different ways, and seldom in a positive fashion. I really think "The Imitation Game" is a movie you should seek out. It's powerful, it isn't just a neat little story about the first steps towards modern-day computers, it's a lot more important than that. (Theatrical version on the big screen, January 1, 2015)