The Imitation Game

Well, it's been almost two years since I updated this blog - which is crazy, but time flies when you aren't looking. Anyway, last night we went with some friends to the Ambler Theater to see the movie 'The Imitation Game', starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightly. I thought it was a great film about an amazing man, as well as the amazing ability of the human race to be really terrible to the people that it should celebrate the most.

 The Imitation Game is about Alan Turing, a British mathematician who, with the aid of several others, successfully cracked the codes being used by the German Enigma machines in World War II, effectively helping to turn the tide and win the war for the Allies. Turing's genius wasn't just that he was a great mathematician, (many of the other codebreakers on the team were as well) but that he thought about problems and situations differently than everyone else did. Turing realized that to beat a machine, one must create a machine. His papers on math and the ability to create machines that would compute complex problems, as well as his work on concepts such as artificial intelligence, allow us to live in the technological age that we currently enjoy.

I'm not going to write a detailed synopsis of the film itself. I don't want to give too much away - besides, you could pretty much just Google Alan Turing, and get a pretty good idea of what you are in for. I will say however, that I enjoyed everything about this movie. Benedict Cumberbatch does an amazing job of bringing Turing's struggles and triumphs to life - the performance is reminiscent of his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes in the way that Sherlock has no sense of how to interact with other humans, yet I didn't find myself thinking about that show or character at all while watching the film. Keira Knightly was great as well, portraying Joan Clarke, a female codebreaker (making her also somewhat of an outsider) that Turing discovered, and one of the few people to accept him for who he was - idiosyncrasies and all. Alex Lawther, played the young Alan Turing and I was amazed by his performance. He not only handled some pretty heavy scenes very well, but he really seemed to have the same mannerisms and physicality of Cumberbatch's older Turing.

The story was completely engaging, and I was surprised to find out that this was the first feature film for screenwriter Graham Moore. The film juggled drama and humor and history superbly and had a moral that developed quietly throughout without ever feeling preachy. I left the theater wanting to write and make movies like this one.

 I had wanted to see this film for a number of reasons - I enjoy Benedict Cumberbatch, I love WW2 movies, and I love movies that are based on true stories. I didn't really know what to expect other than those three things, and I didn't know much about the real Alan Turing either. I walked away from the theater with my brain buzzing away, thinking about everything I do on a daily basis from a different perspective. Thinking about the impact that this man had on my life, and the lives of everyone else in the world. Thinking about how he was treated for being gay in a time where being a homosexual in England was a crime. Thinking about what kinds of things we could achieve in this world if we just accepted people for who they are, instead of trying to make them into who we think they should be.

The Imitation Game is definitely worth checking out if you can!

"Sometimes it’s the people no one imagines anything of who do the things no one can imagine."


ALSO - After seeing this movie, Robin and I wanted to find out more about the real Alan Turing, and we found a pretty good documentary about him that is on Netflix.  It's called 'Codebreaker'.  Also worth a look!