Movie review: The Imitation Game

Benedict Cumberbatch is brilliant in The Imitation Game. Photo / AP

Mathematics won World War II, or at the very least shortened it by a couple of years and saved 14 million lives. That historical calculation appears as a poignant onscreen endnote to this, the first thorough big-screen retelling of the story of Alan Turing.

Though little remembered, Turing led the team that cracked the Germans' "unbreakable" Enigma code (a feat tantamount to bugging the offices of the German High Command).

He also invented the computer (the film's title is that of his 1950 paper, which began with the words, "I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'").

Even less known is that Turing, a homosexual, was convicted in 1952 of "gross indecency", chemically castrated by massive doses of synthetic oestrogen and stripped of his security clearance.

Two years later, a fortnight before his 42nd birthday, he killed himself.

Turing's story has been told on stage (1986's Breaking the Code, was adapted for television) and even on the concert platform (A Man from the Future, written by Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe of the Pet Shop Boys, played at the Proms in July,) but not on the big screen.

The 2001 film Enigma, fictionalised the story by eliminating Turing completely and making it into a spy thriller.

Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) is front and centre in the new film and he's characteristically brilliant, though anyone hoping for a nuanced portrayal of one of the 20th century's most brilliant minds needs to look elsewhere.

The screenwriter, American Graham Moore, avoids airbrushing Turing's homosexuality out of the script, but he does something worse, abnormalising it by rooting it in childhood trauma and dysfunction (he also wrong-headedly imputes autistic symptoms to Turing).

In doing so - and along the way emphasising the crackpot-genius characteristics of its hero - it engages in a modern facsimile of the kind of repressiveness that chemically emasculated him; this film does the same thing with his intellectual identity.

In a top-secret project at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, Turing and a motley group of British geniuses (chess wizards, linguists and mathematicians) were charged with breaking the machine-generated code the Germans used to communicate with their navy.

Turing came up with the idea of building a machine to outsmart the machine, and the film generates real tension from his race against time and his battle with suspicious colleagues and superiors.

The latter is personified by Charles Dance, whose stuffy naval officer is one of many boilerplate and underwritten characters.

Worse still is Keira Knightley, who struggles as Joan Clarke, Turing's best friend (and, briefly, fiancee), one of the story's most fascinating figures. Kinnear, as an entirely fictional detective who functions as the proxy for our retrospective remorse, is the most convincing character of the lot.

What remains is a triumph of period design (Jaguars, tweed jackets, and best bitter in smoky bars) that patronises great achievement by reducing it to a Boy's Own yarn, including a repeated signature line that has less poetry than a McDonald's ad.

The Poles, whose cryptographers did much of the work that Turing built on, have good reason to be miffed, particularly since the real story was so much better.

Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Mark Strong, Charles Dance, Rory Kinnear
Director: Morten Tyldum
Running time: 114 mins
Rating: M (adult themes)
Verdict: Handsome but conventional

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