"The Imitation Game" trumps its rival

Rating: 8/10 (1 February 2015)

"The Imitation Game" and "The Theory of Everything" are two uncannily similar movies. They both tell astonishing tales of genius scientists, their monumental achievements and equally monumental hardships. They both feature excellent lead actors who give career-defining, Oscar-worthy performances. However, in almost every aspect, "The Imitation Game" is just slightly better.
Cumberbatch completely disappears into the role of Alan Turing, a genius mathematician who shortened World War II by two years by cracking the Germans' Enigma code along with a team of scientists. It would have been easy, and cliché, to spend a large amount of time on Turing's struggle with homosexuality, for which he was convicted in the early 1950s. But one of the biggest virtues of "The Imitation Game" is that it portrays Turing's attitude to his sexuality exactly as it was: he never struggled with it, he simply accepted it for what it was. He was wholly devoted to his cause, and anything which stood in his way he would remove, to the point of marrying his team's only female member despite his homosexuality, because her parents would otherwise have ordered her to return to them.
Because the movie is a biopic, it is inherently flawed. The reasons for this are that biopics tend to focus so much on the acting and the story that they neglect such things as soundtrack, cinematography, and script. These things are usually rushed and therefore imperfect. However, as biopics go, this is a good one.
8/10