Less than it could have been

Rating: 6/10 (1 January 2015)

I'm not sure if it's possible to write a spoiler for a historical account, but I checked the spoiler alert box just in case. I think I give lower reviews to movies for which I had high expectations (usually from overly generous ratings on IMDb), but I think I would have been somewhat disappointed regardless. There is seemingly a very interesting story to be told of Turing's life, but this movie gets a bit lost. The whole police interview as narration that starts at the beginning ultimately seems flat. It provides an interesting segue to the scene of his ultimate demise, but too little time is spent on what happened to him after the end of the war, or even after the initial success in breaking the code. Instead, the filmmakers seemed more interested in showing how difficult it was to spend time with him until he discovered the value of friendship with Keira Knightley's help. The writing in those parts just felt kind of boilerplate Hollywood. I did think the scenes of Alan as a boy were quite nicely done.