Past Movie Review: The Imitation Game

I was reminded recently of how great a movie "The Imitation Game" was when it came out in January 2015. This is the story of Alan Turing who is considered to be the inventor of the modern day computer. Turing's incredible genius saved 2 years of the World War 2 and 14 million lives when he invented a machine that broke what was called ENIGMA, which was the machine that encrypted the German communication codes. The number of combinations this machine created was 159,000,000,000,000,000,000 and decoding it was considered at the time almost impossible. This movie is great because of how well the process of building this decoding machine was explained and the breakthroughs that eventually lead to the best way to figure out every single German code and the combination changes that happened every day. Its incredible to realize that Germany and all their evil and murdering of so many innocent people during World War 2 would possess scientists so brilliant to invent a machine like this and so many of the best weapons of war including almost the Atom Bomb. More amazing to realize is that in order to save lives during a horrible war the most important invention in human history, the computer was invented. The insanity of war most unbelievably has created many of the greatest inventions in human history, including the science of medicine. This could be the greatest irony of all.

Another great story within this great movie is that once you have broken the code using this decoding machine, how often can you use it as to not alert the Germans that you have figured out their ENIGMA machine? This one idea creates the best scene in this movie where they all the scientists working on the decoding machine realize that the machine cannot be used that often and only by using mathematical formulas and statistics can they win the war while at the same time not alerting the Germans that the British had broken the code.

The downside of this story is how Alan Turing was treated after the war by England because he was gay and for many years because of this he never received the credit for his invaluable accomplishments during World War 2. I will not spoil the movie by elaborating more on this issue. Only until the year 2013 did the Queen of England finally give Alan Turing the credit he deserved for his incredible accomplishments during World War 2. For me for something like this to take so long is the biggest tragedy of this movie.

Both Keira Knightly and Bennedict Cumberbatch were outstanding in their roles in this movie as was the entire rest of the cast.


I highly recommend The Imitation Game.