When I first walked into the movie theater, I wasn’t expecting much from this movie. Sure, it’s an Oscar frontrunner, but the only thing I knew about it was that it was about computers and technology. And while I can operate computers fine, I don’t really enjoy learning about them. But, as with most movies, this one surpassed my expectations.
A little historical background is necessary to understand this movie. The Imitation Game takes place during World War II. It follows Alan Turing, the man hailed as the inventor of the computer, and a small team of cryptographers at Bletchley Park as they attempt to crack the code of Engima, the code-scrambling machine the Germans used to transmit radio messages. Gaining access to the Germans’ radio codes would be invaluable knowledge to the military, but their codes were almost impossible to crack. There were millions of settings and millions of possibilities. To process all of this information, Turing builds the ancestor of the modern computer to compute information faster and, ultimately, to crack Engima. However, although the movie focuses a lot on cracking Enigma, it also includes other details, such as Turing’s homosexuality and his first love, despite the fact that it was it was illegal to be a homosexual at the time.
The movie was well-paced and suspenseful. I was constantly on the edge of my seat, eagerly waiting for what would happen next. It was also fairly easy to follow, which is always a good bonus when it comes to historical movies. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I was quite saddened by the ending.
However, while the movie itself was quite entertaining, there were a few factors that I was extremely unsatisfied with. Although this movie was based on history, the director embellished every single fact and detail. There was a huge discrepancy between the actual facts and the facts portrayed in the movie. For example, the movie suggested that the codebreaking at Bletchley Park was done by a small, close knit group of people that were making no progress until they had an epiphany and made a breakthrough. In reality, that was not the case. Thousands of people were working on the project, and progress was being made from as early as 1939. There was also a scene where, after the team broke Enigma, the codebreakers decided not to use decoded information to save one of the codebreakers’ soldier brother since it would alert the Germans that Enigma had been broken. However, the codebreaker in question did not have a brother. And the codebreakers had no such authorization over the use of the information. Decisions about what information to use were made at much higher administrative levels.
Several facts about the characters were also severely distorted. The director portrayed Turing as an extremely antisocial, intelligent snob who refused to work with others, exaggerating these traits so much so that I had the impression that he was autistic. However, Turing was never diagnosed as autistic, and in reality, he had many friends and built positive relationships with his coworkers. And many of the scenes of Turing’s childhood were almost completely wrong. The movie also included a secondary plotline with a codebreaker, John Cairncross, who turned out to be a spy for the Soviet Union. He blackmails Turing into keeping his secret with the threat of reporting his homosexuality. However, this entire subplot is complete fiction, concocted just for some extra tension in the movie. There was no recorded evidence of Turing and Cairncross ever meeting. In addition to that, this plot twist blatantly slandered the reputation of the real Cairncross, who was actually a loyal, respected codebreaker at Bletchley Park. And these are only a fraction of the historical inaccuracies in this movie!
In the end, I enjoyed the movie in the theaters. It was quite entertaining and suspenseful, and I would heartily recommend it to anyone who would like an action-packed movie to keep them on their toes. However, the sheer amount of misrepresentation in this movie is quite disappointing. I do believe that writers and the like have a right to a creative license, but the extents the director went to were much too extreme, even going so far as to falsely accuse a real person of being a spy! So, to those who were looking for an exciting, but historically accurate movie, this is not the movie that you are looking for. The Imitation Game is just another overly dramatized, romanticized movie, fit only for the screens of Hollywood.
Iced Tea With Vinegar 