The Imitation Game: Review by Seema Chinchore

A 2014  historical film about British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing, The Imitation Game depicts a key figure in cracking Nazi Germany's naval Enigma code which helped the Allies win the Second World War.

Hidden codes, secret meanings and mixed messages pulse through the reliable, old-fashioned, buzzing copper wires of true-life British period drama The Imitation Game. The film gives us key episodes in the tragic life of Alan Turing. He was the mathematician whose biting, anti-social intelligence briefly ran in step with the needs of the British war effort in the 1940s when he was employed to help break the Nazi Enigma code at Bletchley Park.

Turing’s wartime achievements – kept under wraps for years – counted for nothing when his homosexuality fell foul of the law in the early 1950s, sending an already fragile personality into freefall.

The film lingers on the war period and the Bletchley years, where it’s most comfortable as an ensemble, getting-the-team together drama. Turing’s initial conflicts with his Bletchley colleagues and his friendship with fellow code-breaker Joan Clarke, who was briefly his fiancée. But perhaps the most moving, enlightening and sweetly played scenes are of Turing’s schooldays when we see a young Turing, fragile, stuttering and in love with a fellow pupil. Less delicate is a later scene where Turing is effectively presented as being in love with his big, awkward proto-computer – named Christopher after his schoolboy romance. The script tends to spell out its themes, repeating a corny slogan: ‘Sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of, who do the things that no one can imagine.’

You won’t need anything like Turing’s powers of detection to understand what the energetic, respectable ‘The Imitation Game’ has to offer. Its various riffs on codes, whether moral, sexual, societal or German, are plain to see rather than enigmatic or enlightening. The Imitation Game both brings to life and pays tribute to Turing's history-altering and pioneering work that paved the way for modern computing.