Movie Review: The Imitation Game

Nominated for film of the year, many recently-made fans grumbling its failure to win, newspapers and magazines flaring up with endless praise, I’m sure everyone has heard of The Imitation Game. This world war two thriller tells the story of the historical hero, Alan Turing, and it seems about time that he gets the attention he deserves. Stripped from its history and themes, The Imitation Game delights, thrills, and ultimately succeeds to seize the attention of movie-goers. However, as we remember the purpose of historical stories, or stories in general, it loses quite a bit of its value.

Now, I refuse to fling out anything captious towards this film before I crown it with the respect it deserves, for The Imitation Game succeeded in many aspects. Reasonably I can assume that most people have noticed the hideous trap most thrillers fall into of shallow characters, poor acting, cliché plotting, and most other elements, all for the sake of thrills. Imitation Game rises above these failures and demonstrates that films with depth are more memorable. And peeling them back layer by layer, the film truly fleshes out its characters and paints them complicated and believable. The acting is superb, the filming is excellent, and the writers turned up the suspense to a maximum.

However, it does waste some time on backstory. These scenes seem unimportant. We have no need to know the history of why Turing is the way he is, but merely that he is the way he is. In many films, backstory slips smoothly into the plot and serves as another way to provide information about a character. But as we watch Turing try to win the war, the scenes already flesh out all of the necessary information; there is no need to clarify characteristics already made clear, especially when it disrupts the film’s primary plot. Also, in the end, the entire plot shifts from winning a war to overcoming gay-rejection; I have no issue with plot twists, but a plot twist can seem silly when the twisted plot only lasts for the last ten minutes and shares no organic unity with the rest of the film. However, viewers can easily ignore these faults, for the rest of the film is wonderful.

The Imitation game is a true story, and when I watch a true story, I always make sure to read up on the history after my viewing. Everything seemed rather believable in the film, and so I found myself aggravated when I read up on what really occurred in the tale of Alan Turing. The film paints him as an almost Spock-like character, rather clueless of social clues and not very likeable. He seemed like a genius who would much rather save the world on his own than have to work along-side others. After my research, I found out that the real Turing happily and willingly worked with his co-workers, he was a very nice man, and most people loved him. His team was a very tight unit; they worked with Turing because they liked him, not because they were forced to. This means that the film of Turing’s life completely changed his personality, assumedly for the sake of a “quirky” character, as is the trend these days.

Also, the film never clearly states when Turing died, but it informs the audience that Turing died at the age of 41 in direct response to the claims of him struggling to cope with the sex hormones he was taking. However, nobody quite knows how or why Turing died; in fact, many believe that it was an accident, and present a very good argument of why – you can read up on it if you would like to know. Turing did not die until a year after the trial, and so the likelihood of the death responding to the hormones seems low.

One of the most obnoxious mistakes that the film slips into is that it bases one of its most powerful moments, the scene where Turing reveals that he named the machine after his childhood friend, on a myth. Not a shred of evidence exists which records that he named his machine Christopher.

Now, onto the theme of the film, I can easily split it into two distinct categories: the intended theme and the presented theme. The writers clearly tried to write a story about acceptance – made clear from the discussions and questions of what makes minds different, the gay-acceptance plot, the overly-repeated line that “Sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of who do the thing that no one can imagine,” the co-workers of Turing struggling to accept his differences, and many more scenes. But the presented theme – or, in other words, the theme actually brought forth by the presentation of the film, regardless of the writer’s “intentions” – was a very “man vs. machine” sort of theme. It questions whether at the end of the day logic and mechanical thinking triumphs over human, emotional thinking. The trauma of world war two bears down on the world, and Turing works for an agency that desires to crack a code using humans (keep in mind that even here we have humans fighting a machine, the machine being the code). Turing thinks that they can defeat this code if they instead use a machine of their own, a machine to break a machine, and receives much resistance. This brings our movie to its main premise of the fight between Turing and his authorities, trying to answer the question of whether humans – from the soldiers to the workers already trying to crack the code – or Turing’s machine will win the war. In the end, the machine wins, which contributes to the reoccurring answer that machines triumph.

Turing’s sexuality, a human emotion, leads him nothing to nothing but chaos, for the law forbids homosexuality, and it hurts one of his friends. He loved a friend as a kid, but his friend died, and Turing found his heart broken. A girl loves Turing, but is much wounded when she discovers that he’s gay. The soldiers try their hardest to fight a war, but the tanks, planes, and codes of the enemy trample over them. The agency tries to crack the code using human minds, but they fail, and only Turing’s machine leads them to success.

Alan Turing seems to sum everything up when he asks, “Do you know why people like violence?” and then explains, “Because it feels good. Humans find violence deeply satisfying. But remove the satisfaction, and the act becomes hollow.” This fleshes out Turing’s indicated belief that most emotional actions are hollow, and only have negative results. The movie parallels this.

As much as I would like to believe that the writes purposefully proposed such a thought-provoking debate over man vs. machine, all the material on acceptance points otherwise. It seems they stumbled upon this discussion accidentally. The problem here is the battle between themes. The man vs. machine theme courses throughout the entire film, and thus should have been the primary one, but the acceptance theme, which appears a very minor theme, for it relates nothing the primary plot of winning the war, receives all of the attention. This is very distracting, causes the film to seem uneven, and indicates that the writes had no control over their script.

As a thriller, stripped from its history and conflicting themes, The Imitation Game is a very good film. But it suffers from some major issues, which are far too large to overlook.

I award it three out of five stars.