Movie Review: "The Imitation Game" (Morten Tyldum, 2014)

THE MECHANICS OF ALAN TURING by Mo Shaunette

Above: Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing. Photo ©StudioCanal and The Weinstein Company

While being interrogated by Detective Nock (Rory Kinnear) in Morten Tyldum’s movie “The Imitation Game,” Professor Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) is asked if machines think.  His response?  That the question itself is stupid.  Obviously, Professor Turing explains, machines don’t think as human beings do…but then again, how exactly do humans think?  No two brains operate the exact same way, Turing insists; mitigating factors such as likes, dislikes, aptitudes, and weaknesses mean that there isn’t really a “normal” way of thinking.

            This philosophy is what drives Turing and the narrative sweep of “The Imitation Game.”  For the uninitiated, Alan Turing was a mathematics professor at Oxford who was recruited by the British government during World War II to lead a team of code breakers to translate Germany’s Enigma cypher.  Their work and the invention of the Turing machine (a precursor to the computer) helped end the war years earlier than expected.  But then, a decade later, Turing was found out to be a homosexual, which was then illegal in Britain at the time.  He pled guilty to gross indecency and underwent a court-ordered chemical castration before his death in 1954 (which was ruled as a suicide).

            “The Imitation Game” covers three portions of Turing’s life: his days at school (with the young Turing played by Alex Lawther), where he developed an interest in cyphers and fell in love with his best friend (Jack Bannon); his years at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, where he and the Hut 8 group matched wits with Enigma and he befriended fellow code breaker Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley); and Turing’s final years in Manchester, when the local police began investigating and eventually arrested him.  All of these sequences paint a picture of who Alan Turing was: brilliant, pragmatic, and ultimately assured of who he was and that what he did was for the greater good.

            Mr. Cumberbatch has the meaty role of Turing and plays him as a man high on the autism spectrum—disconnected from people, dedicated to his work, frequently unemotional, and fiercely passionate about his beliefs (the film argues that Turing’s efforts to understand human interaction played into his talent as a code breaker).  It’s not exactly a flashy role, but Mr. Cumberbatch plays Turing with aplomb, pulling off a subtle performance with a high-pitched voice and a slight stutter.  For her part, Ms. Knightley supplements the film with warmth and friendliness, playing Joan Clarke as fiercely intelligent woman who possesses (and indeed, needs) the people skills that Turing lacks.

            Still, in the end the focus of “The Imitation Game” is Turing’s difficulty working with the other cryptanalysts, his dedication to creating the mechanical bombe (dubbed “Christopher” in the film, after Turing’s first love), his struggle to keep his sexuality a secret, and his compliance with the morally questionable actions that MI6 took to win the war.  And above all, the film purports that Turing was just a man who thought differently than everyone else—something that both helped him further the war effort and caused him to be condemned afterwards.