I just saw it. It is not so good.movielocke wrote:it's almost unfair that Imitation Game is apparently so good, because it's so much fun to make fun of it on pure principle.
I went in knowing just the basics about Turing, and I couldn't buy into the film because it seemed packed full of obvious contrivances. Like Argo before it, so much of the time, any intelligent person who put any real thought into the film would've realized over and over again, "there's no way that would have happened."
2. Immediately after solving Enigma, they find out that a civilian ship is about to be attacked within half an hour, and they also find out that one of the other members of their small code breaking team has a brother on that ship. It's possible a lot of this is built on truth, but thrown together in a pile of drama that unfolds in a few moments, it looks absolutely ridiculous and hard to believe.
3. I really hope I got this wrong - by the end, I was seriously losing interest in the story, or rather the story being presented by this film - but when Turing is arrested for indecency, a police officer he's never met before questions him, and with little prodding, he spills all the details about his work during the war, which at this point is clearly explained as classified. (There's even a subtitle at the end that says Turing's work in solving Enigma would stay a secret for over a 50 years.) Seriously?
The acting is fine, Cumberbatch is very good, but that's it, the film is hardly interesting or compelling in the way it investigates anything. As mentioned, they already fumbled the spy story, so that leaves Turing's homosexuality, but what they do with it feels pretty lightweight and very familiar. There are hints of possibilities - for example, Turing's great fondness for a woman that's purely platonic, or better yet, the idea of code-breaking (or rather coded messages) as a metaphor for concealed thoughts, feelings…maybe because you're compelled to hide them by society, or maybe it's a result of emotional repression? These all would've been interesting and compelling threads to follow, but the film barely scratches the surface, it only hints at these ideas, no more.