Superficial and lazy

Rating: 6/10 (16 January 2015)

This was fairly bad. If you choose to make a film which focuses on one character, it should really be an in-depth and detailed character study but unfortunately, I found this to be a very superficial 'made for Oscars' type film.
I didn't learn anything about the Turing machine itself, for example; the engineering aspects, the design, literally no information whatsoever about how it worked was given and this was something I was really interested in. There was only one aspect of Turing's childhood included and nothing more about his life at home or university. We don't see any of his (then) illegal 'interactions' and the historical detail was fairly sparse.
In terms of detail, it felt like the script was written after a brief consultation of Wikipedia.
I'm a huge fan of Benedict Cumberbatch, I really am but he's not a strong actor and never has been. He's fantastic in Sherlock and Star Trek but I don't think he plays 'real' people very well. In fact, Turing, as depicted here, seems to have the exact same sense of humour as Sherlock...
Keira Knightley was the biggest surprise here, she genuinely transformed herself into a completely different person yet I doubt she'll get the same recognition that Cumberbatch will. She once mentioned as her character in London Boulevard (2010), that women are often written into films purely so that the male lead actor has someone to discuss all of his problems with - for the audience to hear. That's something I now pay attention to in most films I watch and this one is no different. I think we see one scene related to her own personal life (at home with her parents) and then it's swiftly back to Cumberbatch.
There's a lot of posturing, posh accents and generally interesting subject matter but unfortunately, I learned nothing about Alan Turing, nothing about the workings of the machine, and in terms of entertainment value, I would probably have got more enjoyment from reading about Turing on Wikipedia.
6/10