Review: The Imitation Game

There may be no more arresting image in The Imitation Game than that of young schoolchildren in gas masks amidst the rubble-strewn streets of wartime London. The Blitz was underway with England battered by near nightly bombings by the Germans; the assault was sustained and relentless - the city of London was bombed for 57 consecutive nights, the most devastating attack occuring on December 29, 1940 with the Germans dropping more than 24,000 high explosive bombs and 100,000 incendiary bombs.

Part of Nazi Germany's success was credited to their possession of the Enigma machine, an encryption and decryption device that allowed them to encode all military radio transmissions. Though three Polish cryptologists had managed to break codes by the Enigma years before World War II, added complexities had rendered the codes practically unbreakable by the time the war began. As Commander Denniston (Charles Dance) describes it to the small group of mathematicians and chess champions engaged to crack the code, the Enigma machine is "the crooked hand of death itself." It's not enough to have a corresponding Enigma machine in one's hands, one needs to know its settings and, as the Germans change the settings every night, the codebreakers have 18 hours to decrypt the day's message before the settings change and they have to start all over again. The problem is the Enigma has 159 million million million possible configurations, which would take decades to decipher. Time is, most decidedly, not on the Allies' side.

One of Denniston's recruits is Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch), a maths prodigy whose belief that he can design a machine that will decrypt "every message, every day, instantly" is the rudder of the film. Turing does not play well with others - he makes it explicit that the other men will only slow him down - and early scenes at Bletchley Park, the top secret facility in which they toiled, depict the boffins at loggerheads with the situation becoming almost untenable when Winston Churchill himself assigns Turing to be in charge of the team. The inclusion of Cambridge maths graduate Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley) tempers the tension, her presence serving as both buffer and restorative between Turing and his team.

Knightley makes her entrance bursting through the doors and stepping into the light, as fine and breathtaking an introduction as Anna Karenina's face emerging from the locomotive smoke. She instantly energises the film which, though engrossing, was starting to take on the dusty veneer of a heritage piece. Her warmth and feistiness breach Turing's insularity and their coupling is classic: one headstrong, the other fastidious. Their relationship also brings to further light the nature of Turing's sexuality which blossomed during his time at the Sherborne School when he met his influential first love Christopher and which, decades later, led to his conviction for indecency for which he agreed to a sentence of chemical castration. These two decisive periods act as extended interstitials within the overall framework of the film.

The Imitation Game is eminently well-made, this is a prestige feature through and through. Watching the men, garbed in tweeds and pinstripes, in their attempts is riveting. Even more intriguing is the moral quagmire that ensues once they do triumph in their endeavours: the breakthrough must be kept secret, otherwise the Germans will find another way to convey their communications. Therefore, they must play God ina "blood-soaked calculus" - sacrificing lives in order to save others.

Morten Tyldum's direction and Graham Moore's streamlined screenplay manipulate so skillfully that one is only too happy to sing the film's praises. And yet... As compelling as The Imitation Game is, there's a nebulousness about Turing himself that one never entirely shakes off. Various characters refer to him as "an insufferable sod," "inhuman," "an arrogant bastard," "a fragile narcissist," and "a monster." Cumberbatch's impressive portrayal encompasses all of those traits whilst also showing us a man more enamoured with machines and for whom the intricacies of human interaction did not compute.

Turing's life was a darker and messier affair than the film leads us to believe. Moore has the artistic license to cherrypick from Turing's life, much as he has the license to have Turing nickname his machine after his first love Christopher even though it was known as the Bombe. Moore is undoubtedly successful in leaving the audience with a strong impression of a remarkable life dealt a cruel and tragic fate, but ultimately Turing remains an enigmatic figure, his inner workings stringently concealed. All we are left with are the broad strokes etched on the plaque at the foot of his statue in Manchester's Sackville Park: "Father of computer science, mathematician, logician, wartime codebreaker, and victim of prejudice."

The Imitation Game

Directed by: Morten Tyldum

Written by: Graham Moore, based on Andrew Hodge's biography Alan Turing: The Enigma

Starring: Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Charles Dance, Mark Strong, Rory Kinnear, Allen Leech, Matthew Beard, Steven Waddington