My Review

Rating: 8/10 (10 September 2015)

The Oscar nominated movie,The Imitation Game is a 2014 historical thriller film directed by Morten Tyldum, with a screenplay by Graham Moore loosely based on the biography Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges. The title,is derived from Turing's proposal that a so-called imitation game be employed as a means of investigating whether or not machines might one day be said to imitate humans and "think."It stars Benedict Cumberbatch as the British crypt-analyst Alan Turing.Benedict Cumberbatch portrays Turing as arrogant and condescending and anything but sociable or likable, but eccentric in an admirable way that is oddly endearing.The narrative revolves around the device that this code-breaking mathematician created that cracked the notoriously difficult, perhaps even unbreakable Enigma code that the Nazis used for virtually all their military communication –- from mundane weather reports to crucial tactical maneuvers — during World War II.And what was it that he conjured up? A little thing we call the computer.Prime minister Winston Churchill once described it as the single biggest contribution to the Allied victory.Turing's efforts essentially stopped the Nazis' path through Europe, helping to win the war and save millions upon millions of lives.Ironically, though, after their game-changing breakthrough, Turing's team must keep their accomplishment hidden lest the Germans find out that their secret transmissions are being intercepted. So it would obviously be a very long time until the record would be set straight, although no one would have guessed that it would take quite this many years.But not only was his part in the cessation of the war more or less taken for granted during the conflict — with much of his work remaining classified for decades thereafter –- but in 1952 he was convicted of "gross indecency" for the crime of being homosexual.