Best Bletchley Park movie yet

Rating: 7/10 (17 November 2015)

The Imitation Game is the best attempt yet to tell the story of the WWII code breakers at Bletchley Park but it's not perfect.
Benedict Cumberbatch is excellent in the role of Alan Turing, the antisocial but brilliant professor. The story of how he approached the methodical task of code breaking by building a machine (a computer?) from scratch is well-told in this movie, with all the accompanying frustrations, half-successes and eventual euphoria.
But elsewhere there are weaknesses. The Imitation Game tries to be a much broader biography of Turing and for instance document the impact his homosexuality had on his life. But while the flashbacks to his boyhood work well, there are virtually no scenes showing the adult Turing's relationship with other men.
Instead, the focus is on his relationship with a woman, Joan Clarke, played by Keira Knightley. She is misplaced in this movie. The relationship isn't a very interesting one and there is no chemistry (perhaps deliberately so). Surely there were men in Turing's life that we should have heard more about?
The Imitation Game could also have better illustrated the terrible consequences of the actions of the men at Bletchley. There is a fascinating moral tale told here - that in order not to let the Germans find out their code had been broken, the British deliberately failed to act on some of the intelligence received. This made them complicit in the deaths of their own civilians (for 'the greater good') and yet all we see of the consequences of this is a quick clip of a smoking transporter ship. It could have been much grittier.
I did enjoy watching The Imitation Game and I still think the Bletchley Park story is quite incredible, but this movie didn't hit all the high notes I'd hoped it would.