Benedict Cumberbatch is so hot right now. But not Chris Pratt hot. I don't watch Sherlock so I don't fully understand the appeal of Cumberbatch. He was pretty good as Kahn in Star Trek Into the Darkness. His voice is great for Smaug. I dimly remember he was a side character in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. None of this really matters for this movie.
Cumberbatch plays renowned mathematician and pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing in The Imitation Game. Turing is a Sherlock-like character who's a genius but socially awkward with a general disinterest in people. He joins a British intelligence team tasked with cracking the German's encryption system, Enigma, during World War II. The Germans changed encryption settings every 24 hours, giving the team very little opportunity to crack the code. Instead of manually trying to crack the code, Turing develops a machine meant to crack the code faster than a human can. Along the way he must learn to let others help him.
Overall the movie is a downer. While Turing and team cracks the Enigma code, supposedly shortening the war by 2 years, the movie also covers Turing's homosexuality, how he lost one of his only friends in childhood, and how the British court system orders Turing to be chemically castrated after the war.
It's a pretty good movie with an interesting character. However, after I left all I could consider was something they skimmed over. Apparently, this group led by Turing was responsible for choosing when to share decoded messages from the Germans, which means they allowed numerous German attacks to succeed that they could have stopped. This is an entire movie unto itself, but Imitation Game just glosses over it.
I find it hard to believe that Turing's team would so easily be given this responsibility. Also, as an optimistic human I'd love to believe that this scenario is impossible from a human nature perspective, but I'm not that naive. It was honestly the first thing I thought about in the movie: if they crack the code, won't the Germans just come up with a new one? But I don't believe they Germans could have developed a new code over the weekend, as is suggested in the movie, nor do I believe that one stopped attack would cause them to immediately decide to abandon the code system.
I also find it hard to believe that the one kid on the team who's brother is allowed to die in a German attack would allow it to happen and remain on the team. Were I in British intelligence, the kid would be off the team immediately. Were I the kid, I'd be considering revenge, either by leaking information to allies, falsifying information, or just beating the shit out of Turing.
First Viewing: 2+2+3+2+2 = 11