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by DaiPlusPlus 1915 days ago
> 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.

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.

1 comments

Does mainstream cinema production portray anyone as a _normal person_ ? It doesn't stop to academics. Every single profession has its tropes, and it's quite uncommon in my opinion that there's much deviation on it.

Police officers end their phone conversations abruptly, academics are lone genius, managers consider their employees as slaves, chefs dedicate their life to their art...

Cinema has its codes, good or not, so you shouldn't really expect them to not be there I think !