Could have been so much more

Rating: 6/10 (17 February 2015)

At the beginning of the movie the Turing character tells us to pay attention, that he won't repeat himself, that he'll go over things fast. What a stupid way to start a movie.
After WWII someone notifies some cop that there was a break-in at Turing's house. Cops arrive. Everything is in disarray. Turing tells them that nothing's missing and to get lost. He treats them like crap. One of them finds it suspicious and instead of being glad that there's no case here, he starts to look into Turing, apparently he has nothing else to do in life.
Now we are taken to wartimes. Turing shows up in some commander's office to announce that he should be hired because only he can solve Enigma. That's the machine the Nazis use to code their military messages. Turing comes across as arrogant and full of himself, again, but the commander goes for it. He assembles a team to work on breaking the enigma code. Problem is there isn't just one code but that it changes every day. Turing demands 100000 pounds to build a machine that will work on the codes. The commanders laughs it off. So Turing sends a letter to Churchill himself who agrees. Now Turing is in charge of the whole operation. He fires some team members and recruits new ones via a public puzzle challenge.
This gives him the opportunity to work on his pet project--a calculating machine. He keeps building it while everyone else works on code-breaking including presumably some little girl he recruited.
Now for no good reason we go to Turing's youth at school. He was awkward with no social skills and obsessive-compulsive. The other boys bullied him. Except one who helped him, who gave him a code and cipher book to read. They developed a friendship and little Turing "falls in love" with him, whatever that may mean for a school boy.
The cop in the meantime digs into Turing's life only to find--nothing. Everything is top secret. He forges papers to request his military file--it's an empty envelope. Somehow the cops find out that before the break-in Turing was with another younger man, so they call him in.
Meanwhile the code-team makes no progress, until through good old-fashioned human intelligence, Turing a la Gregory House, realizes that there are some patterns in all Nazi communications, and now once they feed some of that into the machine, the manage to break the enigma code. But...Turing realizes they can't use the information because it would give away the secret to the Nazis that the Brits have succeeded. So instead he and his team provide MI6 with some probabilities so they can figure out how to use this information while keeping the Nazis in the dark.
After the war it all has to be destroyed and kept a secret. And now we meet up with Turing as he's being interviewed by the cop, or rather, Turing is confessing it all to him--secrecy be damned. Turing is convicted and chooses to be chemically castrated instead of facing jail. In the end we learn his fate.
The Imitation Game starts strong. The whole Enigma operation is fascinating. Turing's arrogance is entertaining. And while not very socially adept, he's a good authority figure when he's dealing with his area of expertise. His friendship with the girl is cute, but that whole story is pointless as it only aims to show that back then, there were different expectations for women--shocking news! Also pointless are the childhood scenes that tell us nothing about Turing's intelligence. Did he or didn't he stand out as a kid for his smarts? Was it evident back then that he had potential? The movie doesn't bother to tell us.
Also missing are some details about the Turing machine. I assume that this thing was revolutionary at the time. Or maybe not? Another thing the movie doesn't care about. How did Turing come upon the idea of the machine? How it work? How did the input work? What does it do with it? Some more technical aspects would have made the movie much more fascinating. Instead the movie-makers focus on the homosexual aspect for some reason and try to imply that Turing's genius was because he was a homosexual, which is laughable.
I was hoping the movie makers would treat the issue of homosexuality with some class and finesse, if they felt the need to address it all, instead they went completely bonkers. And ended up glorifying it, instead of the man and his genius.