A gross distortion of people and events.

Rating: 4/10 (20 January 2015)

Although well crafted and paced by good professionals in almost every sphere of film making, The Imitation Game is sadly reduced to a piece of populist pulp by the dominance of formulaic 'Hollywood' principles that entirely distort the key events and personnel involved.
Alan Turing did not alone invent the code breaking machine seen in the film. He worked in a team headed by Dilly Knox, not even depicted in the film, who succeeded in breaking the code on 23 January 1940. Gordon Welchman, again not depicted in the film, later headed the military section that developed the 'Bombe' machine (called 'Christopher' in the film) albeit with Turing's help but not under his total dominance as suggested in this fiction.
Moreover the 'Bombe' was not a computer as the film states. It was a mere calculator rather than a programmable digital machine. The first computer at Bletchly was developed years later under Max Newman when Tommy Flowers designed 'Collossus'. This film intensely distorts these events and is a disgraceful insult to those who actually did the work.
Worse still the film completely misrepresents Joan Clarke who is depicted as a rather attractive crossword enthusiast recruited by Turing because she can solve puzzles faster than him. This was utter rubbish. Clarke, a 'plain Jane' type mathematician, was already employed at Bletchly when Turing arrived.
Even Alan Turing himself is misrepresented in character. Eccentric he certainly was but the arrogance shown in the film has no real foundation. Moreover he was not uncomfortable with his sexuality or even the hormonal treatment he received as depicted at the end of the film. His friends report that he laughed about developing breasts that would increase his attractiveness to other men.
But the film, funded by the powers that are today, cannot even suggest the dreadful possibility that Turing's death was not the suicide so adamantly stated at the end. Turing was devoted to his mother (also never depicted in the film) and the concept of his suicide without leaving her a letter is inconceivable. He had been warned by MI6 only months before his death not to continue his homosexual lifestyle (they were paranoid after the Burgess-Maclean saga) but he continued to visit Greece where he openly took up with gay men. Entirely happy only a few days before we are told that he then took his own life whilst eating an apple. His family and friends maintain the real chance that he was expediently removed by MI6 as a security risk. And poisoning food with cyanide was then a well used technique in security circles for such requirements.
When a film depicts a Cambridge Professor of Mathematics attacking a machine with a heavy spanner because it is not working fast enough, when a film repeats the single memorable line about unimaginable people doing the unimaginable three times in 30 minutes, when a film states that the central character had the power to decide 'who was to live and who was to die' (again a total nonsense because how the code was used was decided at top Cabinet level and not by the code breakers at all) when such rubbish is presented alongside a string of historical distortions you will know that is essentially rubbish and a waste of time to watch.
And Benedict Cumberbatch's performance, though competent, was too reminiscent of Derek Jacobi's famous BBC2 portrayal in places to be thought of as original. Timothy Spall as Mr. Turner was not even Oscar nominated for his excellent portrayal but Cumberbatch has been included to expand the Turing myth. Thank God Eddy Redmayne is there to take the prize for his staggering performance as Steven Hawking.