The Benedict Cumberbatch Show

Rating: 7/10 (26 January 2015)

The Imitation Game is by far and large the Benedict Cumberbatch show. Credit where credit is due, he does actually sell the role for the most part. It is just a shame that the plot seems so eager to please his character progression at every turn. Knightley marries him and declares she wants to spend the rest of his life with him despite the fact that they do not romantically love each other. The fate of the war relies on him, because it is he who gets to decide what to do with sensitive intelligence information. Matthew Goode alternatively despises him and stands up for him when the plot needs him to so that we can identify with Cumberbatch's struggles. It is one thing to make a biopic center on a character and another to make to world revolve around him.
That is not to say that the movie doesn't work. The Imitation game centers around Alan Turing and his struggle to figure out a mathematical code and at once his place around others. And there really are good parts to be enjoyed here. The fight against figuring out how the Enigma can be deciphered is a compelling one. Seeing Turing trying to figure out how to balance his feelings for his wife, his moral sense and his obligations to his friends is equally enticing. It is in these segments that we actually get a feel about the struggles Turing must have endured as a homosexual man scoring on the spectrum.
In the end, the biggest fault in the whole movie is that it tries to please too hard. It goes through lengths to portray Turing's autistic and homosexual side, all the while assuring us how good the people are who accepted these sides of him and how evil the persons were that condemned them. It's an easy way to pat ourselves and our 21st century beliefs on the shoulder, without giving much nuance to true environment Turing must have found himself to be in. The movie can tell Turing all it wants that it's a good thing to be such a lateral thinking genius deviant, but in the end I don't think he particularly bought it, and neither did I.