The Imitation Games (U.)
Directed by Morten Tlydum.
Starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Charles Dance, Mark Strong and Rory Kinnear 113 mins.
Life and death, as Brucie never quite sung it, is the name of the game. The Imitation Game, as played by Alan Turing and the rest of the Bletchley Enigma code cracking team during WWII, is one of the tamer game of life and death. What they did was extraordinary but deathly dull. The reality that Nazism wasn't defeated on the battlefields of western Europe but in a hut in Buckinghamshire by a bunch of emotionally repressed, terribly British, crossword fanatics is slightly depressing. This biopic of Turing's life is a fearful mix of traditional British stiff upper lip and contemporary Geek chic; it's like a Merchant Ivory version of The Big Bang Theory.
The film faces a couple of serious challenges. Firstly its characters aren't likeable. This is the rare biopic which keeps banging on about what a ghastly chap its subject is. Today, of course, Turing exact position on the Asperger's scale would be clearly defined and there'd be understanding all round, but in the 30s/40s/50s he was just a cold fish who was far too arrogant and direct to have any friends. Secondly, it's a film which can't explain half of what is happening in it to its audience. The mechanics of how they broke the code are whipped through in the hope that we wont notice because they are too complicated for us to grasp. There's an irony about watching this film where everything has to be kept hush hush, while we in the audience probably wouldn't understand it if they just spent the whole two hours trying to explain it to us.
Graham's Moore's screenplay adopts a three tier approach, rooting the film in the war time but flashing back to Turing school days and forward to his arrest in the early 50s for gross indecency and initially the film has a bracing energy that suggest some beyond the norm but by the midway point we are squarely in the realms of solid but unspectacular. Everybody is playing familiar tunes: Dance is a bluff military thick head, Strong is villainous, Goode is smarmy charm, Knightley is being schoolgirlish and Cumberbatch is being the egocentric genius with limited people skills.
Directed by Morten Tlydum.
Starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Charles Dance, Mark Strong and Rory Kinnear 113 mins.
Life and death, as Brucie never quite sung it, is the name of the game. The Imitation Game, as played by Alan Turing and the rest of the Bletchley Enigma code cracking team during WWII, is one of the tamer game of life and death. What they did was extraordinary but deathly dull. The reality that Nazism wasn't defeated on the battlefields of western Europe but in a hut in Buckinghamshire by a bunch of emotionally repressed, terribly British, crossword fanatics is slightly depressing. This biopic of Turing's life is a fearful mix of traditional British stiff upper lip and contemporary Geek chic; it's like a Merchant Ivory version of The Big Bang Theory.
The film faces a couple of serious challenges. Firstly its characters aren't likeable. This is the rare biopic which keeps banging on about what a ghastly chap its subject is. Today, of course, Turing exact position on the Asperger's scale would be clearly defined and there'd be understanding all round, but in the 30s/40s/50s he was just a cold fish who was far too arrogant and direct to have any friends. Secondly, it's a film which can't explain half of what is happening in it to its audience. The mechanics of how they broke the code are whipped through in the hope that we wont notice because they are too complicated for us to grasp. There's an irony about watching this film where everything has to be kept hush hush, while we in the audience probably wouldn't understand it if they just spent the whole two hours trying to explain it to us.
Graham's Moore's screenplay adopts a three tier approach, rooting the film in the war time but flashing back to Turing school days and forward to his arrest in the early 50s for gross indecency and initially the film has a bracing energy that suggest some beyond the norm but by the midway point we are squarely in the realms of solid but unspectacular. Everybody is playing familiar tunes: Dance is a bluff military thick head, Strong is villainous, Goode is smarmy charm, Knightley is being schoolgirlish and Cumberbatch is being the egocentric genius with limited people skills.
