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.

Sword Art Online is Terrible (Spoilers)

I’ve never actually posted about anime on this blog, but I love watching it. In fact, I’ve been watching it since I was six years old, when my brother watched Azumanga Daioh with me, though I barely remember it. Although I’ve come to realize that a lot of anime out there in the world is terrible, I always prize the rare diamonds in the rough. So once, I decided to hit up Sword Art Online. Big mistake. It’s quite an unpopular statement, but Sword Art Online is terrible.

There are almost no lasting characters. Kirito just meets random people. None of them stick around with him at all. Mostly, they just die ten minutes into the episode, leaving the watchers wondering why Kirito is crying over this person he barely knew. And the ending of the first arc was terrible! Kirito and Asuna BOTH died, but somehow they both live in the end! How is that even possible? And when they asked the creator why he would trap the players in a game, he just responded with “I don’t know.” What? Are you serious? You can’t just make the villain do something with no reason at all! Who the hell is evil enough to trap kids into a game and kill them if they die in-game for no damn reason? That’s some of the worst writing I’ve ever seen! But the worst thing isn’t the sporadic characters that come and go–it’s the characters that actually stay.

Asuna is a horrible character.

First off, it seems like she’s got multiple personality disorder. When she’s wearing her hood, she’s all mysterious, cool, and badass. But as soon as the hood blows off, she’s a cutesy tsundere who always clings to Kirito. They tried to make her badass and skilled in battles, but her personality outside the battles is sweet and adorable. The makers of this show tried to make her both extremes at the same time, but they executed it terribly. Instead, they’ve made a completely contradictory, mess of a character that we’re supposed to like. For example, she says, “I didn’t come here to eat good food,” yet the same girl maxes out her cooking stat. Asuna just doesn’t make sense. It’s clear that the makers of this show wanted her to be at least a little badass, but they took that away too, in the second arc. They just turn her into the classic “damsel in distress” and she barely contributes anything to the story.

Kirito is too perfect. I understand that protagonists should be strong and cool, but Kirito is honestly way too good. I could understand him being a beta tester and more experienced than the others, but being overleveled? That’s way too unfair, and it means that we as the audience never fear for him dying, since he can kill anything in a slash. This also takes the interest out of the battles, because Kirito’s never gonna die, so why have the battles in the first place? And the reason for him being overpowered in the second arc is utter bullsh*t. All his stats from the previous game get transferred to Alfheim Online? That’s LITERALLY cheating! It’s not that he farmed a lot, or that he beta tested the game. He just cheated his way into the game!

As for the second arc, I actually enjoyed the fact that Asuna was never there, although it was terrible writing for them to do that. But that forced love triangle was ridiculous. Sugu was Kirito’s surrogate sister for God’s sake! And I know that Kirito was actually adopted and that Sugu’s actually his cousin and whatever, but to him and Sugu, they were brother and sister. Who in the world would fall in love with their older brother? Sibling relationships are loving, yes, but they are nothing close to that! I have an older brother who’s awesome and amazing, but I’d never fall in love with him because our relationship is distinctly familial. I can’t even imagine thinking of him in a romantic way! Obviously, the creators of Sword Art Online were running out of ideas or they never had any siblings.

In the end, Sword Art Online is absolutely horrible. It doesn’t deserve ANY of the praise it’s given.

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.

My View on The Hunger Games (Spoilers)

The Hunger Games is an awful series. I have no idea why it is so popular. And before I get showered in hate comments, I do actually have valid reasons for this.

The last book in The Hunger Games is definitely the weakest point in the whole series. The first book hooked me in enough to get the second book, but it started going downhill from there. The second book wasn’t nearly as good as the first one, but I was still interested enough to get the last book and finish the series. That was probably one of my biggest mistakes when it comes to getting books, second only to buying the Divergent series. But we’ll get to that later.

In the first few books, the plot is mostly centered on the Hunger Games, of course, and on the corrupt government that rules over Katniss’ society. The plot is fairly straight forward and interesting to read,and  even if they weren’t the best books I’d ever read, I still liked them. But of course, the series gets TOTALLY ruined by the last book.

While the story takes place when Katniss is in District 13 and trying to support the rebellion in Mockingjay, the story itself doesn’t emphasize the cruelty of the Capitol nearly as much as the other books did. Suddenly, Katniss needs to be used as a figure for the rebellion, which gets rid of her appeal as a badass character, and the story mostly revolves around her trying to decide between Peeta and Gale. Surely a book about a dystopian world would focus on the action and revolt. But no, now it is all about the love triangle between Peeta, Gale, and Katniss.

Also, there is so much unnecessary tragedy in the last book. To me, it just feels like Suzanne Collins wanted to have a tear-jerker and decided to kill off most of the characters that weren’t as important as Katniss, Peeta, and Gale. For example, Finnick just randomly dies. We don’t see him die, we just literally have to assume he dies because he stays behind and sacrifices himself to save Katniss. And it isn’t even tragic! I loved Finnick as a character, but when I read that part, I barely reacted. It didn’t seem realistic. It was just like I blinked and he disappeared. And what did Finnick’s death accomplish? As far as I can see, it didn’t add anything to the overall story. The most it did was leave his fiance behind. Even Prim’s death didn’t really do much for the story-yes, it sinks Katniss into a deeper depression, but as I state below, Katniss’ character hardly needs that extra sadness.

Another reason The Hunger Games was a horrible story was Katniss’ character. In the first book, Katniss is portrayed as a very selfless and independent character. She volunteers to go into the Hunger Games in Prim’s place. Before that, she had to hunt for her food and becomes the breadwinner of her family. She also survives in the Hunger Games  pretty well on her own. In fact, Peeta just weighs her down when they team up. She had to save him by getting the medicine for him and shooting Cato to save Peeta’s life.

However, by the third book, all this is thrown away. Instead of being strong and determined, Katniss becomes riddled with weaknesses and basically falls apart in Mockingjay. She is constantly depressed, and while I don’t remember the details,  I do remember that Katniss’ thoughts fall in a darker direction and she even tries to commit suicide at one point. Her character just becomes a needy little kid who is only useful because of her popularity. In contrast with her personality from the first book, Katniss constantly thinks about Gale and Peeta and whines about needing someone to lean on, or else she can’t live. I really admired Katniss for being one of the strong female characters in the first book, but I completely hated her by Mockingjay.

Honestly, I have no idea how this book series has gotten so popular. It doesn’t deserve any of that publicity.