I don't know if I should give this a 10 or a 1...

Rating: 10/10 (14 October 2019)

I have deeply conflicted feelings about this film. It is one of the least stuffy, stagey biopics I have seen. The screenplay very cleverly splits Turing's life into 3 sections and inter-splice them to give a general impression of the Turing's state of being. Unlike most biopics it does not feel like a encyclopedia entry of first guy did x, then guy did y. ETc. It feels like a story.
Best of all the film uses something like a Turing test as the central image of the film. (spoilers?) Turing was arrested for gross indecency because he was gay and the film builds the flashback structures around a (fictional) account of him being interviewed by a cop. It is only at the last moment the confession is presented as Turing asking the cop to judge his humanity based on what he says. (This notion of the ethical implications of a machine passing the Turing test is not at the forefront of Turing's idea but an obvious consequence of them). It is striking how this structure demonstrates Turing's idea.
The film's technical aspects are wonderful. I especially like Cumberbatch's performance. And Knightly gives a very good performance as well. The directions finds a nice balance between being thrillerish and drama.
But for all that it really, really bothers me that Turing's work on cracking Enigma is presented as almost a single handed achievement. The work by the Polish intelligence service and Polish mathematicians is completely ignored. (This is not trivial, through statistical analysis they were able to decode about 60% of messages). The movie makes it seem like only one decoding machine was built, and by Turing himself. In fact over 200 machines were built and a whole slew of engineers were involved. Etc. The film even got the order of cribs (i.e. working from known words to crack the code) wrong. The Victory (aka Christopher) machine was built starting from a crib and it wasn't an idea that occurred to Turing at the least second. This really beefed up the social isolation of Turing to a degree that was unwarranted.
Likewise, the film does not shy away from Turing's gayness as a fact. And more importantly it does not whitewash his suicide. To the film's credit it presents the societal oppression quite correctly. But Turing is weirdly de-sexed. His gayness is presented as an academic aspect of his life. There is no scene that shows him being intimate with another guy. The love story in his youth is weirdly chase.
In the end I think I really like this movie but I don't know. I guess 10 today will work.