Okay film, mostly interesting for its historic references

Rating: 6/10 (7 March 2015)

"The Imitation Game" was one of the big players in the 2014 awards season mounting in a Best Adapted Screenplay win at the Academy Awards. I have to say that I strongly disagree with this decision. The script may have been the weakest part of the movie. While it occasionally delivers and even shines, it also hits the lowest lows from all the factors that contributed to this film. Especially the beginning is extremely weak. The first 15-20 minutes only have one purpose, namely to show us what an unlikeable and antisocial character Turing is. And it does so with zero subtlety. It is as much uninspiring and in your face in an equally embarrassing manner as Graham Moore's Oscar speech was. Sorry, but screaming out to the world that you tried to kill yourself decades ago is just as low as it gets.
But back to the movie: Turing fires a couple people he deems unqualified and acts arrogantly by saying that employing him is the only way to find out if the Nazi code can be really cracked. The whole movie is about decoding secret messages, so you would expect that the script would have at least a little bit reading between the lines and subtlety. For the most part, it did not. Then there is another problem with this whole story. Everything about it was a well-kept secret for a very very long time, so you could wonder how much about it is really accurate and how much is merely fictitious. One fictitious point is the way in which this film tries to tell us that decoding the system won the War. Very inaccurate. What mostly won them the war was German soldiers succumbing to the cold Russian winter, which is not mentioned a single time. However, there is a Russian spy sub-plot included, an inclusion that this film did not really need, and the only thing I liked about it is how people actually knew about him. Interesting counterintelligence reference.
Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley (with some comedic delight) gave decent performances, but it was nothing they hadn't shown in previous performances already, so I disagree with the two Academy Award nominations. "Sherlock" and Assange had pretty much everything already that Cumberbatch delivered here. Among the parts that I liked about the film was pretty much everything at the end. The scene in which we see the two characters meet again and Turing suffer from his medication was very well done (much better than when he pushed her away in boring stereotypical manner minutes before) and so was the final shot when they burn their work after they succeeded. I also really liked the fact that they had to hide that they cracked ENIGMA in order to avoid letting the Nazis know. But even with this stroke of genius, the script failed again when they decided to randomly include a relative of the team being killed and they could do nothing against it in the grand scheme of things. Just completely unrealistic this coincidence, very cringeworthy. Easily the best part of the film is Morten Tyldum's direction. It would have been a lot worse without his great approach here and I'm glad to see he got the Oscar nomination. Great breakthrough for him. He was unknown outside of Scandinavia before his work here.
Alexandre Desplat managed another Academy Award nomination for his score here and won the category, even if for another film. Special mention to Charles Dance who played his small role perfectly. Also Matthew Goode was in here and there are talks he may become the next James Bond. On the flashback scenes, I am not entirely sure if I liked them. I thought the Christopher reference was interesting, but they could have kept these shorter. Oh yeah, and another criticism about the script: There is absolutely no way that some of the smartest men of Great Britain would need a random comment from a female friend in order to find out that "Heil Hitler" is in every decoded message, especially with the two H's at the beginning every time. That was just unrealistic. Same can be said about a Russian spy being stupid enough to get caught by letting his Bible just lie around somewhere. One part that was very much in the face, initially funny, but quickly repetitive was how Turing was only able to decode the factual message his co-workers told him and did not realize for example they were asking him to grab a bite with them.
All in all, it is an okay movie, mostly worth it for its historic value (if accurate), but it's nowhere near the best of the year or deserving the accolades it received except for Tyldum's direction.