An entertainment, a history lesson, and a lesson in moral contradictions

Rating: 7/10 (10 January 2015)

Professor Alan Turing is the man who broke the supposedly unbreakable Nazi encryption Enigma. He started very awkwardly at an MI6 sanctioned team based in Manchester. As his fellows uses various methods to decipher Enigma, Alan instead designs a machine to do that. When his team leader denies his request for his machine's spare parts, Alan wrote to Churchill himself, who then makes him the new team leader. Alan fires disagreeing members and re-recruits through selecting with a crosswords puzzle. They get Joan Clarke through this. In and out the movie also shows Alan's school days, a time when he only has one friend Christopher, gets bullied by others and his anti-social manners starts to grow in him. Alan and the former team leader Hugh fights due to Alan not helping the rest of the team in decipher work while he only tinkers with his machine. Joan helps him to reconnect with them, who then defend Alan when the MI6 is firing him due to his completed machine is not working as fast as it should. When Joan states she's returning home due to traditional culture reasons of having to marry at twenty five but not having any candidate yet, Alan proposes to her as the most logical thing to do.
One night, the team go to the pub for drinks with Joan and her friend Helen. The anti-social Alan gets confused when Alan and Helen flirts at each other. But a hint from Helen's intuition of partially breaking the cipher sends the team and Joan rushing back to the base. Alan finds that there are repeated words that makes the cipher predictable thus the machine doesn't have check on all possible setting. With that they manage to break the Enigma. But immediately after, the team has to fight against moral values to let a convoy be attacked less the Nazis will find out that Enigma has been broken and they'll change the cipher design. Alan and Joan goes to see MI6 head Menzies to arrange cover ups so the Germans don't get suspicious about the broken enigma. Alan finds out one of his teammates John is actually the double agent their commander has been suspicious of. But Peter threatens to open Alan's own secret of being gay. The suspicious Menzies forces on Alan by threatening to convict Joan as the spy. Alan reveals John is the spy but Menzies says he already knows that and insists Alan to decide what to leak and what not to leak to John. Alan opens up to Joan about his being gay and Joan says she can accept that. The war is then won and Menzies tells the team to keep it a secret. In 1953 Alan Turing is sentenced to a hormonal therapy and killed himself a year later.
The story is a great one due to being a depiction of many moral contradictions on varied fields. We see conservative traditions hinder so many things, including the efforts to win the greatest war ever fought to date. Things such as binding women to social values as to marry at most on her twenty fifth age, A gay is legally punished just for being gay, and that someone is doubted due to being anti-social are just some of those things. It's good that eventually persistence and a little bit luck, as in chance meets preparation, helps a great deal to overcome those things and win the war.
Its's quite the shame since the person gets to be humiliated by punishment and considered fair whereas his achievements of saving many lives is kept silent for the past fifty years or so. It's nice to see that characters like Hugh Alexander and Joan Clarke exists in the real world. They embody the good things about tolerance and willingness to work together and adapt, instead of dismissing people based on their obvious flaw but neglecting their other potentials.
Back to this movie, the drama is nicely set around the aforementioned base conflicts. The characters built strong in their own share of significance. But even the least significant character, like Peter who only has a big impact on that one convoy thing, is designed nicely to make the story's drama strong. The movie centers itself mostly on Turing, having the other characters appear in and out and even putting Turing's character as the narrator. But the screenplay nicely share the liveness of the scenes at all the other characters every time they are involved.
The acting feels very nice in overall. I really like how Benedict Cumberbatch does all those confident stutters and manages to reduce a little bit of his deep voice to reach the level of perceived insecurity of Turing. Kiera Knightley also acted nice in recreating the more authentic feel of the woman of that particular era in England, and at the same time still looking smart and confident. Matthew Goode and Mark Strong also give their characters great work that they have nice impacts to the movie.
My say for this The Imitation Game (2014) is that it deserves a score of 7 out of 10 and a recommendation to go and see in the cinemas. Besides being a great lesson in history and a nice entertainment, this movie also serves us a great lesson in those moral values contradictions that hinder progress.