The Imitation Game

"Sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine."

In 1939 Britain declares war on Germany and officially joins WWII.  To aid the military, the British government gathers brilliant young mathematicians to an elite code breaking team.  The team is housed at Bletchley Park and is under the supervision of Commander Denniston (Dance) and MI-6 leader Stewart Meniezs (Strong).  The team is top secret and tasked with breaking the German Enigma code.  The code changes daily giving the team hours to attempt to break the code.

Alan Turing (Cumberbatch) a socially awkward mathematics prodigy, believes that the only way to break the code is to create a machine that will solve all possibilities.  The other members of the team, Hugh Alexander (Goode), John Cairncross (Leech), and Peter Hilton (Beard), are not impressed and continue their work separately.  To expand their team Turing places a crossword puzzle in the newspaper, it is solved in record time by Joan Clarke (Knightley).  Clarke joins the secretarial staff at Bletchley Park while sneaking around to assist the code breakers.  Can the team work together to crack Enigma?


A fascinating historical film.  Who knew a film about mathematicians could be so interesting.

The film is structured like a puzzle, asking the viewer to piece together what is happening as the story jumps from a police investigation 1951 to boarding school in 1927 to the start of Britain's involvement in the war in 1939 and back again.  As the story continues you start to piece together the nonlinear narrative and connect the pieces:  it is a smart choice by writer Graham Moore.  The film is directed by Norwegian director Morten Tyldum, in his English language debut.  The story is based on the biography Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges.

The casting is excellent here.  Benedict Cumberbatch is best known for playing another brilliant and cocky man: Sherlock Holmes on the BBC show Sherlock.  Cumberbatch shows Turing's intelligence while still showing his vulnerabilities.  His was nominated for an Academy Award for this performance.  He is matched by Keira Knightley as Joan Clarke.  Knightley's Joan is instantly likeable, while proving that she is no slouch and is seen as a valued member of the team, at a time that women were not given these jobs.  Knightley was also nominated for an Academy Award for this film.  The scenes between Cumberbatch and Knightley are great, and show a comfort between the characters that are forced to hide so much of their identities.  The other standouts from the code-breaking team are Matthew Goode and Allen Leech.  Goode has a decent career of film and TV roles and is good here.  Leech is best known as Branson on ITV's Downton Abbey.  It is nice to see him in a different role.  Charles Dance and Mark Strong are always good as morally ambiguous characters.

The story mostly focuses on Turing's code-breaking years, while flashing back to his boarding school days and the reason for his interest in puzzles / codes.  And the flash forwards show a very different man, broken by the government he used to work for.  An undercurrent of the film is Turing's homosexuality, which hits all three time periods of the film.

The Imitation Game (2014) 114 minutes
Rating: PG-13 for some sexual references, mature thematic material and historical smoking
Director: Morten Tyldum
Starring: Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing
Keira Knightley as Joan Clarke
Matthew Goode as Hugh Alexander
Rory Kinnear as Detective Robert Nock
Allen Leech as John Cairncross
Matthew Beard as Peter Hilton
Charles Dance as Commander Denniston
Mark Strong as Stewart Menzies
James Northcote as Jack Good