Review of The Imitation Game (one or two spoilers)

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.

Mainstream Novels Need More Character Development

A novel has a plethora of different story elements that work together to make an amazing book. However, many of the more famous and mainstream novels focus way too much on the plot and the action and just poorly develop rather badly written characters. Character development is the most important factor of a story. Plot is not nearly as important as the characters you experience the events of the story through.

The characters of a story must be relatable and likable, as well as grow as people. No amount of action can make up for that. After all, who cares about a monster attacking the protagonist if the characters have shallow personalities and superficial conflicts? These characters must be able to change throughout the course of the novel. In fact, there is really no need for an interesting plot if the characters are developed well in the novel. For example, my favorite book, The Book Thief, is focused primarily on the character development and the protagonists relationship with others. Almost every one of my friends I recommended this book to thought it was bland and tasteless. However, they themselves liked bland and tasteless novels, filled with forced love triangles, overly sappy romance, terribly written protagonists who seem to have multiple personality disorder, underdeveloped side characters, and mostly random deaths that contributed nothing to the overall story(See “My View on The Hunger Games” and “Why Divergent Sucks”). All of the books they liked, the super popular mainstream novels, always emphasized the action and either left out most of the important character development, or developed the characters with disgustingly horrific and clunky writing.

With all of these action-based-terribly-written-stories becoming the most popular dish, many of the genuinely exceptional stories get pushed to the bottom of the trash heap. A friend of mine literally said “If it has no plot, it’s automatically a terrible book” to my face. I thought that people who took the time and effort to read books would at least have some form of taste, but it seems like I was wrong. The development of a character’s personality and traits is more important than anything else a book has to offer.

Why Divergent Sucks (Spoilers)

Divergent is a very popular book series-the movie came out recently. But honestly, this story is even worse than The Hunger Games.

The beginning of the series was action-packed and entertaining, but it deteriorated quickly after that. I picked up Divergent, giving the popular dystopian novels another chance, and in the first book, I had high hopes. Tris was a very admirable character. Obviously, she was brave, and she was also unflinchingly selfless, despite her own feelings toward being too selfish. She even stands in the middle of a target while Tobias throws knives at her face so that her friend wouldn’t have to do it. However, a big complaint I do have about the first book is Will’s death.

First of all, Will didn’t even have to die. There was barely any effort put into his death scene, a fact that is accentuated by his very likable personality and his growing relationship with Christina. This is yet another textbook example of an author randomly killing off a character in an attempt to pull some heartstrings. Even though Will was one of my favorite characters, I wasn’t really floored by his death. It felt too rushed and last-minute. After all, it’s not like Tris had to kill him. She could have simply shot another part of his body so that he would get distracted, allowing her to escape. But no, Veronica Roth decided to have Tris kill him so she could have PTSD in the next book and draw some tears. Also, Tris is barely fazed by the fact that she killed Will in the first book. She just shoots him and moves on, without mourning him at all until the second book. She also uses her gun hundreds of times without any hindrances.

The second book didn’t really add much to the overall story. Tris’s character weakens (see “My View on The Hunger Games”). Now, she can’t use a gun because she shot her friend. She didn’t seem to have any problem using it after Will’s death in the first book! But now, she can’t touch one without feeling fear. She worries a lot more about her friends and about Tobias. In fact, most of the second book is a blur to me. The biggest thing in Insurgent is that Tobias keeps nagging Tris about being too selfless-something I don’t really agree with, because I can’t see any noticeable change in Tris’s behavior from book one to book two.

And then comes Allegiant, book three. This book was so horrid that I stopped reading it right in the middle. It was absolutely terrible, even worse than Mockingjay. The plot was extremely poorly written. That surprise plot twist in the middle completely eradicates the purpose of the factions all together! The whole POINT of the factions was that you had to choose the one that you felt spoke the truth, even if it meant that you had to leave your family behind. It was all came down to a characters morals. Factions before blood, right? And Tris goes through one of the toughest choices she has to make in the whole series by choosing to leave her family behind. But with this nonsensical plot twist, the whole foundation for this series literally disappears! It’s not a questions of morals now, it’s just the question of a person’s genetic makeup!

And another thing! Tris’s death scene is the worst death scene I’ve ever read in my life. Now, I didn’t actually read through the whole book to get to that part-a friend of mine told me about Tris’s death and I went back to find it and see if Veronica Roth had enough writing skills to at least write that well. Of course, my hopes were brought crashing down once again. First of all, Tris isn’t even aware that she is dying! It’s literally like her mother appears to her and tells her she can lay down her burdens, which is one of the cheesiest things I’ve ever heard of. Anyway, there are no sad last words, or any tragic realizations of how short her life was. She doesn’t think about how she’s leaving behind all of her friends, or how Tobias cope when he realizes that she’s dead. And when I found the scene in the book, I didn’t even realize that Tris was dying. I thought it was some sort of hallucination from blood loss or something, but I didn’t think she was actually dying. It was only in the next chapter that I realized Tris had died. As with Will’s death, I didn’t feel sad at all. With a death like this, I’m surprised if anyone managed to dredge up some tears.

Divergent doesn’t deserve to be popular. Honestly, I’m not that confident in the tastes of the public anymore, if they liked this unstructured mess.