The Imitation Game

2014 biopic

Rating: 14/20

Plot: English Mathematician Alan Turing races against the clock to crack the Nazis' Enigma code, but it's enigmatic. Hence, the name. Oh, and he's gay!

For the record, I like the other best-picture-nominated biopic--The Theory of Everything--a little more than I liked this one. And for the record, I don't care for biopics all that much. This has a more intriguing story and a little more drama. It also has a really good performance by Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing although it's not nearly as good as Redmayne's Hawking. The period details are good, there's a little humor, there's some subtle social commentary, and the historical figure is somebody I really knew nothing about who people should know things about. Turing's story is good source material although with the way Hollywood tells these stories, it's kind of hard to know how much you can trust these things. I liked the Turing character created here though. Humorless, direct, ruthlessly literal, he's definitely off-putting but it comes across as charming because he's English. But it's a fun character. He's a poofter, ya know. That's a word I'd love to add to my vocabulary because it's kind of cute, but I know I can't because it's pejorative, probably as offensive as the F-word in America. Or as offensive as the F-word should be. I haven't seen Cumberbatch in much. In fact, I didn't really remember seeing him at all, odd since I see his name all the time. He was apparently in that first Hobbit movie, but I think he may have just been a voice. He was in 12 Years a Slave, and I do remember him in that. And he was in Four Lions, a great movie, but I don't remember him in that either. Anyway, he's good here. I've been meaning to check out his Sherlock Holmes thing.

The problem with this movie is the same as the problem with The Theory of Everything. It's a biopic, and there's apparently some unwritten rule that you have to color-by-numbers when making a biopic. Everything about this is predictable. And I'm not talking about the narrative which, since the subjects of biopics are usually famous, can't really be helped. I'm talking about everything else--the written dialogue, the score, the style. The writers/director try to do a little something with the narrative. It's all disjointed and flashbacky, but that's actually more of a distraction here. The structure of this doesn't really enhance the story or its characters or themes. You could have shown me about then individual frames of this movie, and I could have constructed the whole movie from that. Turing running? Turing hunched over a desk or fiddling with machines? Slam those together with some big orchestral music and have yourself a Turing running/inventing montage! Bam! Oscar time! There's a quote about "imagination" hammered into your head no less than three times and, just as you'd expect, a bunch of stuff you have to read right before the credits. The movie's so by-the-book that you'd think it was made by somebody who couldn't eat from a plate where peas and carrots were touching.

It's not a terrible movie, and I am glad that Hollywood decided to share the story with us.