"Human" The Imitation Game (2014) Review

as found on hollywoodreporter.com

Out of all the scientific movies that came out during the holiday season The Imitation Game is one that makes scientists seem the most human. Many will argue with me that the blatant simple love philosophy of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar or Stephen Hawking’s biopic, The Theory of Everything, made the characters, mathematicians (having similar stereotypes as scientists), human. I would beg to differ. Though both films do capture the human condition in some cinematic capacity, the Interstellar and The Theory of Everything lack the full representation of people beyond the ‘normal’ and those of the ‘normal’ within the hegemonic western culture.

Certainly, most of the arguments supporting that the humanistic portrayals of the other two movies were better revolve around Benedict Cumberbatch’s portrayal of Alan Turing. Cumberbatch’s portrayal is no less mesmerizing, capturing the nuances of an obsessive compulsive man trying to operate as a normal person. The OCD of Alan Turing can be seen as an outward direct composure of the generic view of a scientist as one who is able to do extraordinary work but at the sacrifice of his social skills and sanity.

The simple interpretation of Alan Turing or his portrayal as being a generic scientist would simplify Morten Tyldum’s interpretation of the events. First, Alan Turing has been posthumously diagnosed as being autistic. Second, Alan Turing was also a homosexual. These factors make the figure of Alan Turing as a human being much more complicated than the ‘normal’ spectrum or even as a scientist. To complicate it more, the film makes it clear that contemporary England punishes people who are homosexual thus the film depicts a man trying to ‘imitate’ a heterosexual being.

However, the audience may have problems with this posthumous diagnosis. The audience seems to forget that the supporting characters are also top mathematicians in England. And, supporting cast, Joan Clarke, Hugh Alexander, John Cairncross, and others on the enigma cryptographer team, were portrayed as ‘normal’ but just extremely smart. The supporting cast does no less than an amazing job with developing a contrast between each other as well as the portrayal of Alan Turing as expressively done by Benedict Cumberbatch.

The Enigma, as found on en.wikipedia.org

Now here comes one large unavoidable problem. Alan Turing did not actually solve the enigma. Well, the movie did not make an explicit distinction between the two different enigmas that the Nazis employed: the land based enigma and the naval enigma. The land based enigma was solved by the polish and was called the ‘bombe.’ The naval enigma is the enigma that the film is talking about, which was aptly solved by Alan Turing.

The Imitation Game is a fantastic film. I find this film arguably humanistic if not the most humanistic film to come out during the last holiday season. A final thought on the ordering of the films events, the film illustrates Alan Turing’s life out of order. At first it may have been a bit confusing but eventually you should be able to discern its functionality. As in the words of Billy Pilgrim, “All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.”

Trailer: