A trip to the PUB with friends just may let you solve the biggest problem of WW2.

Rating: Null/10 (3 April 2015)

I was able to see this at home on DVD. Excellent movie, it deserves its nominations for Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Supporting actress. I'd bet that many dramatic liberties were taken with deviations from the actual true story, but it is based on real people and real events.
The focus is Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, Cambridge Maths prodigy of sorts who was one of the several hired in late 1930s England to try to break the coding, changed every 24 hours at midnight, of the German Enigma machines. Turing was particularly focused because he had written a paper "The Imitation Game" and had great faith that it took a very capable machine to match and break the Enigma.
Turing is also given much credit as the father of the modern digital computer, because the concept he used for the mechanical computer he built, which was successful, is essentially the concept followed in the 1940s and beyond to make all-electronic digital computers. The invention of the transistor and integrated circuits were just a few years too late to let Turing himself take advantage of their benefits of reliability and computing speed.
As the story in this movie goes, Turing and his team were stuck, the machine worked but it was too slow. It needed to do 20 million man-years of computation in just a few hours until the codes were reset and it never could get there. But one fateful evening at the PUB with his associates, a female clerk speaks of a certain German always first mentioning his girlfriend, and that combined with the daily coded weather report got Turning to realize the machine could make far fewer computations, looking for words they knew would be there, once they cracked those the rest were straightforward and quick. It worked, they broke Enigma, and knew of all the Nazi German messages.
This brought about a new problem, to act on every message would soon tell the Germans the code had been broken and they would go silent. So they had to use statistics to predict how much information they could use to assure defeating the Nazis but not reveal their code- breaking, and part of that was to leak false information of how they learned of certain attacks they foiled. It is estimated the work of Turing and his group ended the war 2 years sooner and saved millions of lives.
Cumberbatch really does give an award-worthy performance, as does Keira Knightley as Joan Clarke, a young single lady who became part of the team. When she turned 25 and was still single her parents wanted her home. Always the problem-solver Turning instead proposed to her, so she could stay working with them. Turning as fate would have it was a homosexual, still illegal in England in that time, he didn't marry Joan and in fact was eventually arrested and made to receive hormone treatment, but ended his own life shortly after.
Really a fine movie, it tells the story very interestingly.