Interesting biopic

Rating: 8/10 (27 December 2014)

This is a movie about the British Mathematician Alan Turing and his contribution to the super secret British WW2 effort in cracking the Enigma machine, the machine used by Germans for encrypted communications.
Overall this is a serious movie, however like most British movies of recent years there is a mix of crowd pleasing light humor including taunting, teasing, flirting, and witty dialog to keep the movie from getting too dull or tedious and reveal some character aspects.
The movie uses flashbacks to trace Alan Turing in his early teens at a boarding school and his close friendship with a classmate with whom he shared a keen interest in mathematics and cryptography. It depicts Turing as an introverted and arrogant person with little social skills who is brilliant in mathematics and and a top level mathematician in Britain. It traces the ups and downs of the code cracking team that culminated in the breaking of the Enigma code.
Setting aside the simplifications necessary in telling a story in a feature film and not a documentary, the movie is apparently substantially accurate. There is one subplot involving a Soviet double agent in Turing's team that is not believable at all as we later learn that the cracking of the code was kept secret from even the high echelons of government lest the Germans get wind of it and change the design of the Enigma machine. The security man in charge claims he has allowed the Soviet double agent in Turing's team to let Stalin know of the progress of the effort. The same double agent claims he knows Turing is a homosexual and warns Turing not to blow his cover, otherwise he would reveal Turing's homosexuality, then illegal in Britain and punished by a jail sentence, to the authorities. It is strange that the British security was unable to "sense" what the presumed double agent had "sensed".
This is a movie worth seeing.