Short Take: The Imitation Game

This review originally published at Pol Culture.

The Imitation Game, directed by Morten Tyldum from a script by Graham Moore, is a watchable but fairly substandard piece of award bait. This biopic of British computer-science pioneer Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) gives itself two tasks. The first is to dramatize Turing's behind-the-scenes heroism in World War II. He headed the team of cryptographers who cracked the Enigma code, a supposedly impenetrable cipher system used by Nazi Germany in all its communications. (The solving of the code is estimated to have shortened the war by at least two years and saved millions of lives.) The film's second task is to portray Turing as a martyr to the mores of the time. He was homosexual. A few years after the war ended, he was prosecuted for indecency, subjected to a dubious form of hormonal therapy as punishment, and he committed suicide shortly thereafter. Tyldum and Moore do a poor job of reconciling their two goals. They repeatedly interrupt the Enigma project narrative with flashbacks and flash-forwards. The flashbacks tell of a near-romantic friendship the adolescent Turing had with another boy at boarding school. The flash-forwards deal with his prosecution and its aftermath. The time shifts are confusing at first, and they don't add much to the viewer's understanding of the Enigma story. Turing's homosexuality isn't relevant to the Enigma narrative at all. It's only referred to when he tells other characters about it; he's never shown taking a romantic interest in another man. The Enigma story, at least as presented, isn't terribly interesting in any case. Several of the scenes leading up to the code’s solution are hackneyed filler--Turing’s inability to get along with his co-workers, conflicts with the military brass, and so forth. And one can't take it seriously as history. There are just too many scenes that ring false. The most absurd moment is perhaps when Turing's team, in order to protect Allied strategic interests, decides to withhold news of the breaking of the code from their superiors. (This and many other things in Moore's script have no historical basis.) The film isn't even that interesting as an actors' showcase. Apart from the purring-voiced Mark Strong's too-brief turn as British intelligence chief Stewart Menzies, none of the performers are especially compelling. Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, and the other cast members do solid work, but apart from Knightley's amusingly delivered "Oh" during a briefing scene, they aren't very memorable. The film has solid production values, and Tyldum keeps the pace humming, but that's about it. The script is nominally based on Andrew Hodges' biography Alan Turing: The Enigma. The cinematography is by Óscar Faura. Maria Djurkovic is credited with the production design.