Ignoring Important Facts Makes For A Better Film

Rating: 7/10 (7 April 2015)

This is a film that garnered instant acclaim on its release . You can understand why because it is engineered as award bait . Perhaps conscious of this by the time the Oscars came about the film and the buzz about it seemed too have disappeared slightly even though on the big night it picked up one of the more prestigious awards for best adapted screenplay . I did have reservations before I watched THE IMITATION GAME . Alan Turing was of course a homosexual in an era when homosexuality was outlawed so I jumped to the conclusion we'd be watching some grief whoring PC bio-pic where the subtext gets all shouty and ranting that see how a nasty society treated a gay man who defeated Nazi Germany single handed . On top of that as ENIGMA showed from a few years back the premise doesn't lend itself to cinematic storytelling and despite being a work of fiction with a James Bond subplot shoehorned in that particular film ended up being very boring so I didn't have any great hopes for TIG
What the film does superbly is painting Turing as an uber-geeky eccentric outsider . I've no idea what the real Alan Turing was like as a person but as the stereotypical view of a genius who knows the square root of everything while knowing nothing about social interaction Cumberbatch is vey good here . He was in the running as the eleventh DOCTOR WHO and watching him here you get the taste of what he'd be like as an alien genius in a performance that never seems forced in anyway . What the screenplay deserves great credit for is that any unpopularity wartime Britain had for Turing wasn't down to a homophobic society but entirely down to Turing lacking any social tools and the possibility that he might be a Soviet double agent when the Soviets still had a neutrality pact with Nazi Germany . Turing's homosexuality is addressed of course but this is a small part of the story . Best of all the film explains the impossible task of breaking Nazi codes that in theory would take 20,000 years
Where the film does fall down is in overstatement . Breaking the enigma codes was only a very small factor in the defeat of Nazi Germany and quite often the allied leadership had to ignore the information since they didn't want to the Nazis to realise their codes had been broken . That said the one campaign of the war that terrified Winston Churchill was the U-boat campaign so this is valid . What possibly isn't so valid is the overdone clash between the enigma team and Denniston . Again I've got to put my hand up and say I haven't researched the real life story but people on this page claim to have and this is entirely fictional . I tend to agree and much of this interaction doesn't ring true and seems to be included to have an obstacle in the way of the protagonist .There is of course the constant criticism of nearly British film you've seen in the last couple of decades and that is the look of the production seems more in keeping with high budget television than cinema
I found myself enjoying THE IMITATION GAME more than I expected . It has a strong cast on top of their game and the story which on paper doesn't seem all that interesting did hold my attention . That said one gets the feeling that much of this is done by playing hard and loose with facts to make a better film and John Ford was always saying "Print the legend". Treat it as entertainment rather than a fly on the wall documentary and you won't go wrong