Embrace Enigmas

Rating: 9/10 (19 March 2017)

The Imitation Game (2014) seamlessly ties together three story sequences from different times in the life of brilliant mathematician Alan Turing, played by Benedict Cumberbatch. Most of the film's screen time is dedicated to wartime when Turing and his team, hired by British government, are working diligently to crack the Nazi code, Enigma. Turing has a brilliant obsession to create Christopher, a machine sure to break Enigma. Turing's teammates, including initial team-leader Hugh (Matthew Goode), find Turing's personality to be quite intolerable, which leads to tension and disconnect amongst the members. Turing's only female recruit, Joan (Keira Knightley), understands and appreciates his quirks and genius, and helps build bridges between Turing and the rest of the men. When tensions arise and suspicions of a spy surface, the group finally comes together to use Christopher to break the code, and use their newly gained knowledge to make war-winning decisions. Throughout this storyline, seamless transitions are used to take us back in time to Turing as a young school boy, developing feelings for his classmate, Christopher, and learn how and why he became the master code-breaker we see during the war. We also are moved forward in time to post-war life for Turing, when, after reporting a break- in, Detective Nock (Rory Kinnear) pursues an investigation of Turing which has devastating long-term effects on his life. Accepting enigmas seems to be an underlying theme of the film, whether the enigma is a machine, situation, or person. Turing himself is an enigma to others; he is uncomfortably antisocial, often seeming self-righteous, and no one understood him or expected his machine to work. This is supported by dialogue, one quote in particular which is repeated three times throughout the film: "Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine." Christopher said this to young Turing, Turing to Joan, then Joan again to Turing later. The structure of the storyline is also somewhat of an enigma, as it begins in medias res, and the viewer is forced to pay attention to follow the back-and-forth of times, though superb editing makes this easy to do. One such smooth transitions, is a wipe with the left to right transition of a bomb flying across the screen which turns into a cigarette getting put out against a wall in a different time and place. Once the pieces of the plot "enigma" are put together in the end, it falls into place for the viewer to understand, similar to Christopher Nolan's The Prestige (2006). After seeing the film, you might walk away with a stronger conviction to accept people for who they are and to embrace a challenge, no matter how confusing they may seem in the beginning.