The Imitation Game

The last time I reviewed a biopic, the brilliant The Theory of Everything, I went on about how biopics are often made to try and win awards rather than get financial success. I have no complaints about this because we often get a brilliant story told, and if they are appealing to the awards boards they are at least aiming for some sort of quality. So can the other biopic nominated for awards, The Imitation Game, reach the heights the Stephen Hawking biopic did?

After the start of World War 2, Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch, Star Trek Into The Darkness) is hired onto a cryptography team that aims to decipher the ‘unbreakable’ Enigma Code. However not only does he have to battle superiors which don’t believe in his work, but he also has to deal with the fact that he is a homosexual, something which was illegal at the time.

The story is told through three time periods. The main story is in World War 2 where Turing and his team is aiming to break the enigma machine, but there’s also a story where Turing is in boarding school and is realising he has feelings for his best friend and one a few years in the future where police officer Robert Nock (Rory Kinnear, Skyfall) is investigating him after there was a break in at his home. I’ll go into depth for the latter one later, but the middle story of Turing’s past is very rushed. We should be seeing young Turing (Alex Lawther, X+Y) and Christopher Morcom’s (Jack Bannon, Fury) relationship grow so when the emotional hit happens, it hurts. Instead it’s brushed over so quickly and the film seems too eager to return to the enigma machine story so when that emotional hit happens, it has no effect. The performances from the young actors are impressive, but the story gives them no time to impress and ingrain themselves in our mind.

Luckily though, the rest of the actors are given enough time to impress. I think like everyone, I was starting to get a bit sick of Benedict Cumberbatch being in everything and being linked to everything else but here he is really good, selling his character brilliantly, though we’ll get to his character later. If Cumberbatch can do a performance on this level and not be comic book style like he was in Star Trek Into Darkness, we’ll soon love the fact he is being linked to everything. But as nice as it was to see Cumberbatch return to form, the news that Keira Knightley (Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl) can actually act is very good news. I’m not saying it’s an amazing performance, I still don’t think she’s capable of that, but her connection with Turing really worked and it was when they were both on screen together was when the film hit its emotional peaks.

However there was one major thing that irritated me more than anything else. The character of Alan Turing. Now before I go on, I have no idea if Turing was actually like this and his family does say it honoured him, though some accounts said it was exaggerated. But I’m having a hard time believing that. Because Turing is a genius who is antisocial and likes only a select group of people, and mainly because they are useful to him in some way. That sounds very familiar to me. Yeah, doesn’t it sound like Cumberbatch’s other famous role, Sherlock? Maybe when the script was written it just happened to be like that, or maybe he was but it was incredibly distracting that Cumberbatch was playing such a similar role to what he does on TV. Yes he does it very well, but I want something different from him because I know he could do it.

Also, the film then decides that Patch Adams and the rest of the bad Robin Williams films are suitable inspiration. Turing is constantly going up against his superior Commander Alastair Denniston (Charles Dance, Alien 3) who doesn’t understand his work. I hate this story line. Not only is it massively overused, but it makes no sense. Denniston is desperate to win the war and would welcome any attempt to try and crack the Enigma machine, not just want to fire Turing at any chance he got. And even worse, apparently this was fabricated for the movie. So we get a crappy story line for the sake of a crappy lie about a character that basically slanders him.

Because of the character work we’ve seen before in a load of other films, it’s very hard to make any sort of emotional link. Except for at the end. If you know the story of Alan Turing, you’ll know that he was found guilty of indecency and was chemically castrated for it. The scene where Turing is shaking and obviously damaged from it while interacting with Joan is the best scene in the film. Not only do both actors do brilliantly, but the horror that a country could do this to a person it should see as a hero, as a Brit I am particularly ashamed of how we treat him, is just allowed to lie there. Though even this scene is lowered a bit when this was fabricated too. Not only did Joan never visit Turing after the war, but chemical castration didn’t cause this and actually inspired him to do some innovative work on mathematical biology I’m pretty sure director Morten Tyldum (Headhunters) needs a damn fact check machine.

So really, The Imitation Game is just a massive disappointment because it fails on a lot of levels. It makes a great hero into a Cumberbatch archetype, makes up many parts of its story in order to be more dramatic and made me compare it to the rubbish that is Patch Adams, which similarly fabricates a story about a great man in order to cause more drama. Many people compared this to The Theory of Everything. That is an insult to that great film as this comes no where near to the emotion that created.

Best Moment: The climactic scene of seeing Turing post-castration. That hurt so much, though knowing that was fabricated makes me very angry.

Worst Moment: Pick any Denniston scene. Just complete crap.

2/5