A Bite from the Poisoned Apple

Rating: 6/10 (24 January 2015)

This year's choice of Oscar nominated movies left me pretty unwilling to go to the movie theater. Reading the reviews on IMDb turned me even more off and some movies I may consider seeing are still not in the theaters where I live. But I felt like going to the movies again so I decided to give the Imitation Game a try, mainly because I grew up in an environment of scientists. My father was about the age of the mathematicians in this movie and he worked during and after WWII in an institute of research in Europe for the defense department. Everything the physicists, engineers and mathematicians did was top secret and only many years later did I learn what they were working on, so the movie was familiar to me in many ways.. Movie scripts which are based on true stories and then decide to change the facts in order to appeal to their more simple minded viewers, have never been my favorites. I could not get myself to go and see the movie the Theory of Everything about Stephen Hawking because I read that it is mainly a relationship story and I was more interested in his work. And I am a woman and not a scientist. I felt a little bit the same in this movie because too much emphasis was put on the fact that Turing was gay. Of course I thought it was very important to point out that at that time in history homosexuals were prosecuted no matter where they lived. So there is no need to feel superior there over the Nazis.
Afterwards I read that the only female mathematician in the film was wrongly represented because she was obviously already working as a mathematician at Bletchley Park before Turing even got there, which was quite rare at that time and should not have been muddied by acting like she was just some girl doing cross words..
I sometimes watch the TV series the Big Bang Theory and am amused about their portrayal of scientists. Well, that is supposed to be a comedy and while they got some traits of scientists right, they are over exaggerating like crazy by portraying them all as bumbling idiots when it comes to social graces. In the many years I have known scientists in the circle of friends of my parents, I have met no bumbling idiots. Most of them were extremely sophisticated and well informed people, who were able to hold their own in any social setting. I just cannot imagine any of them having temper tantrums like was shown in the Imitation Game . It looked to me like a continuation of the school years,which i also found exaggerated and I would have been happy without the whole school segment. I cannot remember any bullying at school when I grew up , it looks to me that this is a more modern thing
I also cannot imagine that a bunch of scientists can make any military decisions like it was implied in this movie. When they showed the scene where supposedly the brother of one of the scientists was on a convoy which was going to be bombed in twenty minutes, and they were debating if they should save his life, they lost me. They also lost me when they never showed any male love interest of Turing. If there was so much emphasis put on the fact that he was a homosexual why not show him having a homosexual affair? I can understand that homosexuals at that time would enter pretend marriages, but after what I read now about Turing he had homosexual affairs quite openly.. As I learned after watching the movie it was also not true that they were the only ones to break the code. Iam getting so tired of this endless portrayal of the Germans as Uebermenschen, though of course it was amazing how such a small country could win so many battles in WWII. Compare that to the huge military force of the US losing one war after the other, it is quite impressive.
I am not saying that it was a bad film, but I did not find it so spellbinding and fascinating as many other reviewers did. I would have preferred if they would have concentrated more on the process of finding the solution and the excitement of making new discoveries in science. We need more scientists and I do not think that portraying them as social outcasts helps.
The most fascinating thing I read browsing through the other reviews was that Steve Job used the bitten apple symbol because of the cyanide laced apple Turing used for suicide. If that is true, that would be quite something.