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by AndrewOMartin
1908 days ago
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About 10yrs of my academic career included studying much of Turing's work, I've read his biography by Hodges multiple times (one of the most incredible books ever written btw, covering in great detail everything you could want to know about Turing, his family, his life and his work), and worked closely with some of the best academics in the country on the subject of Turing. I'm not showing off, and I don't mean to say my opinion is correct, but let's just say I have at least some claim to know what was going on. I watched the Imitation Game with my wife who knew little to nothing about Bletchley park and Turing. I have to say, that given 90 minutes I couldn't have done a better job in giving them a good feel for the situation and the pressures, the ideas and personalities involved. I can say with confidence that pretty much everything said or shown in every scene is significantly inaccurate, but taken as a whole, and with an understanding of the restrictions, it's a very good job. If you can't live without knowing the specific truth, read Hodges. If you can, just watch the film then get on with something else. |
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Sincerely, I do defer to you for your opinion of Turing's personality - but when I saw the film it was so very disappointing that Turing was written as a lone-genius type - while it didn't drive the plot, I understand it really wasn't what he was like as a person. Come to think about it, I can't think of any mainstream cinema production that portrayed a leading academic as a _normal person_ - they invariably fall into stock character tropes, and The Imitation Game was no exception. That's what disappointed me the most.
Additionally, like many other historical biographies, the film condenses multiple people - or in this case, entire teams of people into single characters. I can understand that for budgetary and storytelling reasons, but the film's decision to substitute Turing's circle of literally a handful of characters for what would have been hundreds of cryptographers and researchers (out of a Bletchley Park workforce of almost 10,000 people concurrently in early 1945!) was enough to break the film for me - and even if that fudging wouldn't have made me take issue with the film the scenes where Turing-and-Chums single-handedly make moral decisions about the handling of high-level intelligence certainly did. Those scenes added nothing of historical value and would have added emotional tension only to viewers entirely ignorant about how military intelligence gathering and analysis works - which, unfortunately, seems to include the film critics.