Its so hard to make a great movie, this one just missed

Rating: 6/10 (17 January 2015)

So many things need to come together to make a great movie. You need a good compelling story, the Production ability to make the story, a good Director, the ability of the actors to make the scenes believable; from the cinematography, to the soundtrack, etc.
One of the things that I left out, is writing.
The writing in this movie is what I found to be lacking. The acting by Benedict Cumberbatch was superb, the story matter in itself was enough to make a great movie.
All the makings of a good story. You have one of the original Fathers of the computer, whose machine he designed helped win the war for the Allies, coupled with his tragic death due to the fact he was a homosexual, its a story to tell.
However, this movie is not written well. I would rather the story had been written linearly, with no flashbacks. Even the flashback at the beginning would have been fine, if they had told the story linearly from there on out, but they didn't
The flashback to his teen years and his first crush went nowhere and added nothing to the movie. Neither were the flashbacks to the police officer trying to "solve a mystery" that in real life wasn't a mystery. (Turing called the police in real life to report the robbery and then he naively admitted to the police his homosexual affair)
The whole police matter could have waited till the end of the movie. I can understand wanting that to be significant in explaining Turings eventual suicide, but it wasn't.
They also never explained(unless I missed it) all the scenes of him running. Turns out Alan Turing was quite the marathon runner, but that is never explained.
I know that 2 hours of people sitting around doing math and trying to solve enigmas would be a boring movie, so they added drama and took some artistic liberties to fill around the specter of war and the race against time.
I really liked the material, thought it was sad, yet very interesting movie, but it could have had a much better script