this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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I just recently watched The Imitation Game for the first time. I dunno how accurate it is, but it was an amazing performance by Cumberbatch.
Historically speaking it's a lazy character assassination.
Elaborate please
By the character assassination he probably means he's depicted as an asocial eccentric genious, while by all accounts he was a fairly normal charming person.
And regarding his accomplishments, the movie is also completely wrong. His Enigma decoding work was of course very valuable, but as others mentioned here heavily based on earlier polish efforts, and teamwork, not just him. It's also portrayed as an early computer, and is then said that he was at the basis of modern computers. This is bullshit, that device was in no way close to modern computers, and he was at the forefront of theoretical computer science. Look up the turing machine which is a theoretical device that can compute anything an actual computer can compute, but has very simple properties making scientific/mathematical analysis of what computation is, what is computable, ... possible. Which is an incredible achievement, would be nice if they mentioned that in the movie...
(and also the entire story is just fantasy around the work that happened for enigma. His nemesis in the movie that was against building the machine also never existed etc...)
The only thing truthful about the movie is "There was a gay computer scientist named Alan Turing that played an important role in decoding the enigma encoded messages during the second world war", and all the rest is just invented drama that's not in any way based on reality. He wasn't some autistic genius, there was no nemesis, he didn't invent computers, nor was the enigma decoding device related to computers, etc...
Thank you for spelling all that out. I knew Hollywood would take dramatic liberties but they basically wrote a completely fictitious drama and dropped a historical figure into it.
You're not the person I asked, but thanks for that awesome write up.
The lazy autosm-washing aside: Turing went to his grave never speaking about his accomplishments - still under the OSA at the time. He was neither involved with the decision to use or not, things that were discovered via cracking enigma. The acts that film lays at hia door in the sake of some lazy drama repreaent a vilification of his character.
It completely misses the mark on what he actually accomplished.
Didn't they remove Alan's gayness out of it?
The whole movie is about how gay he is
Oh, wow Glad to hear that actually. I had heard wrong things I guess
No, it's a dominant theme throughout.