The Imitation Game

A film set in Britain during the Second World War. Germany is using a cipher machine. Its settings change every day at midnight and the number of combinations is too large to solve by hand. A team is formed at Bletchley Park. Alan Turing joins it and refuses to take part in what the others are doing; instead of solving by hand he wants to build a machine. He gets on with nobody. He fights with his superior, makes no friends, and the machine does not work for months. From there the film runs in three times at once. School years, the war years, and a police investigation in 1951. The machine finally works. But a problem appears: using what it decodes would reveal that they can decode it. What the narrative is interested in is not ciphers but concealment: Turing hides something his whole life, and the film puts the war secret and the personal secret in the same frame. The last section is after the war. Turing is convicted for being homosexual and chooses hormone treatment over prison. Its fidelity to history was argued over. A spy subplot is largely invented, Turing's relations with those around him are drawn worse than they were, and the building of the machine is attributed to one man. The screenplay won the Academy Award for adaptation. Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Mark Strong and Charles Dance are in the cast. Morten Tyldum directed. Who it is for: anyone who wants a war and science story told in the classical manner. Who it is not for: anyone who wants to learn the history correctly; the film noticeably rearranges the facts.