Alan Turing had the great fortune to be born in an age where he could get funding for a machine that no one understood or really believed would work. He had the great misfortune of being born into an age that thought who he had sex with was more important than his work.
The Imitation Game tells the story of Alan Turing, a singular genius on a par with Einstein and Tesla. Our modern world lacks such men because they lacked the vision of Edison, who saw that genius could be harnessed for profit. Any potential Turings or Teslas are now funneled into research labs and their discoveries are stamped with a brand name and their names are forever lost to history.
It’s hard to get over the last few minutes of The Imitation Game. A country’s strict and inflexible moral code leads to a tragic end. Of course, Alan had all kinds of problems, he appeared to be a bit autistic as well as a homosexual. I have to wonder if the United States knew about Turing. They were scooping up Nazi geniuses left and right, wouldn’t they have liked to have Alan Turning at Area 51? The mind boggles at the possibilities.
The Imatation Game was a great film. I loved the sets and the actors and how the film was put together. There was a lot of hopping around in time as we watch Alan struggle with people at three different stages of his life. The main story involves working on breaking the Nazi Enigma Machine, a second story deals with Alan’s police problems in 1951, and the last story deals with Alan as a boy in a typical British boarding school. He doesn’t exactly fit in anywhere.
Of course, it should come as no shock that Alan Turing was tossed aside after WWII, so was Winston Churchill, who gets mentioned in passing here. Alan and his team are told to get on with your lives and forget you ever knew each other. Just like everyone else that worked at Bletchley Park.
The Imitation Game is a good old fashioned movie with a lot of clear cut heroes and villains. We know to root for Alan and to hate bullies, Nazis, and homophobes. Spies and double agents make slightly less impressive heroes. And Alan is not always an easy fellow to feel warm and fuzzy about. But you do feel that he got the short end of the stick. All three tales have sad endings. It was all good though.
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