About.com Rating

The Imitation Game accomplishes a real feat:  It manages to take code-breaking - ostensibly, a non-visually exciting exercise of mental gymnastics - and turns it into a serviceable "almost" thriller.  It does this mostly by repeatedly emphasizing the stakes that are involved.  After all, this isn't just any code, but it's the enigma code, the secret code, which allowed the German Army to communicate with one another without their messages being understood by Allied forces during the second World War.

 

And the code breaker in question isn't just any code breaker, but Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch), the British mathematician that eventually ended up deciphering the enigma code, and thereby ending the war two years earlier than it otherwise might have lasted.

And yes, this is a true story.  (This is a subject matter that normally would be reserved for film documentaries about the second World War, but Turing as a character is interesting enough to make it work as a narrative film.)

This film is also most definitively a World War II war movie, yet there are no tanks, no light infantry, and no fire fights.  Yet as a viewer of the film, there's never any doubt that this is a war movie.  The film reminds us of this as it cuts back and forth between Turing and his team at Bletchley Park going over mathematical formulas, and to British civilians taking cover in the subway tunnels during air raids.  Turing and his team trying to diagram an early computer formula, and the North Sea where British ships sink beneath the waves due to German U-Boat attacks.

 In other words, there might not be any firefights in this film, but the tension is still ratcheted up because we're aware of the real world consequences of Turing and his team not defeating this code.  As one MI6 agent explains in the film, every ten seconds a British soldier dies, "Oh, there's another one just now."  The longer it takes to defeat the code, the longer the war will continue, and the longer the war, the longer the list of deceased.  (Talk about working under pressure!)

And not defeating the code seemed a real possibility.  As Turing points out in the film, the Enigma machine had 158 million million million different possibilities, each one of which, had to be tested to find the right cipher in order to break the codes.  This was a task made that much more complex due to the fact that each day at midnight, the Germans changed the code, meaning that these 158 million million million possibilities had to be tried within each 24 hour period.  A task which, of course, is completely impossible.  That is unless you're Alan Turing and able to develop a sort of early stage computer out of turning cog wheels and some diodes.

How, Alan Turing's machine that he builds within the film works (an early predecessor to the modern computer) is never quite explained.  Nor is it explained how the machine somehow reduces the number of probabilities that have to be tried.  As an audience we're not trusted with that sort of information, the filmmakers presumably thinking we'd just be confused.  Instead, we're told only that this machine somehow breaks the code.

This film, just as with a recent PBS documentary on the logistics of Normandy, shows that wars are really won, not by brave soldiers, but by having an edge in information, resources, and command structure.

And once the code is broken, when it should be time for a victory lap, the film really stuns the audience with the realization that the Allied Forces won't be able to always use the code.  If the Germans suspected that their code was broken, they'd simply switch to a new coding method, and the work of the previous years would be for nothing.  Instead, Turing explains, the British government will have to let soldiers die.  This is easily the most devastating part of the film, that even though the British government now know all of the German communications - they can't use them.  At least not, wholly.  Instead, as Turing explains in the film, MI6, the British intelligence service, will have to apply probabilities to each broken message, considering each communique in light of the value it will provide for Allied forces in winning the war, against the threat of the Germans realizing their code has been broken.  The result is a lot of dead Allied forces in the meantime.

Bendedict Cumberbatch delivers a fantastic performance of an introverted man who is both shy and serious, yet undoubtedly a genius.  A closeted homosexual, Cumberbatch plays Turing as a man separated from the world at large.  A few post script scenes after Turing has been arrested for homosexuality, and flashbacks to his childhood, round out the film to make it a bit of a war film biopic, but it mostly remains a story of how the Enigma machine was conquered.

As war films go, there aren't any battles, but it still manages to be fairly exciting, even if it'll never make the top ten World War II films list.