Very enjoyable even if vastly inaccurate

Rating: 7/10 (29 April 2015)

I have been very anxious to watch the Imitation Game especially since I so deeply enjoyed the book/biography on which it was supposedly based: "Alan Turing: The Enigma" by Andrew Hodges. The movie is overall well directed, performances are good - in some cases exceptional (see Cumberbatch as Alan Turing)- but the script deviates so much from the original story that I wish I hadn't read the book first.
The movie presents the story of Alan Turing and the agonizing work of a team of coders at Bletchley Park as they try to crack the Enigma, the machine used by Nazi forces to transmit encrypted messages for the various aspects of the war operations.
Alan Turing, a truly enigmatic and complex character (the movie only scratches the surface of his personality)is presented as more or less singlehandedly leading the attack to the Enigma. In reality, crucial contributions have been made by a Polish team who were already able to break the Enigma before the outbreak of the war (they handed their knowledge to French and English) and thanks to either pure luck (see German mistakes) or pure heroism (see dedicated missions to the Atlantic to retrieve Enigma machines).
Alan Turing's work was indeed brilliant, following up on the insights he provided in his key scientific contribution - the universal machines - and the upgraded (compared to the Poles) "Bombes" machine that he helped design.
The brilliance of his, and his co-workers' at Bletchley, work is diminished in the film in rather simplistic, "hollywood" style revelations. On the other hand his role is vastly upgraded with regards to decision-making about how to use the knowledge of the broken Enigma messages - something he never took part in. I honestly wonder what good these deviations from his true role really do.
Speaking of deviations and inaccuracies, pretty much every character that appears in the film is either misplaced in time, role, story or in terms of interaction with Turing. Moreover the difficulties and importance of Hut 8 work, are significantly misrepresented - mostly confined in false power-plays, spy-hunts and melodrama, while the true pathogeneses of the British war machine are completely overlooked.
Last but not least, the way the movie treats Turing being a homosexual is absolutely out of the actual framework of the period he lived in and of his own perception for it. The arrest/detective/interrogation scenes are wildly imaginative with no apparent reason - in terms of helping to build Turing's character in the film - and the insights on his teenage years are not adequately projected.
Notwithstanding all the deviations mentioned above, the film does succeed in creating an engaging atmosphere and I assume that for those who never heard of the actual story before it must have a strong impact.
7 out of 10 for the "final product" noting the immense deviation from the actual story.