The Imitation Game (2016) - Review
Originally published June, 2018After watching Dunkirk, I was in the mood for some more highly-rated WWII movies. I tried to watch Darkest Hour on the plane but was unable to finish it. So, when I got home I saw that Netflix had added The Imitation Game, among numerous other WWII movies—Hollywood sure loves to make movies about that war. The Imitation Game was rather well-regarded among my personal friends, as well as professional critics, but I only saw it for the first time recently. I cannot say that I liked it very much, despite all of the positive qualities it has.
The Imitation Game has the Oscar-bait perfume to it, which always rubs me the wrong way. I cannot stand it when a movie that has the potential to tell an interesting story decides to take the typical shortcuts and easy sentimental routes that have worked so well in the past at swaying The Academy into giving out awards. It doesn't make the movie bad, and it doesn't diminish the performances of the actors involved, but it definitely makes me not interested in the movie anymore.
Pros
Benedict Cumberbatch proves that he is a very good actor with his performance here
Small snippets from the dialogue are clever and funny, at times
Supporting cast of Keira Knightly, Mark Strong, and Charles Dance
Cons
Bored Cumberbatch narration does not improve the flow of the movie
A disjointed and splintered timeline that bounces back and forth from the 50s to the 40s to the 20s makes the experience more confusing than interesting
The rest of the script that does not include the clever snippets of dialogue
Forced sentimentality, forced emotions, and pandering
Whimsical score grates on the nerves
CGI battle sequences that are meant to remind you it's a WWII movie look like they were made on a computer 20 years ago
A Russian spy sub-plot that is almost completely pointless
Plot & Thoughts
The Imitation Game is a "biographical" drama that centers around Alan Turing, a mathematical genius who was involved in breaking the Nazi Enigma code during WWII and who is also known for the invention of computers and the "Turing Test." I do not personally know much about Turing, but when the film opens with the line "based on a true story" I always have to assume they forgot to the add the word "loosely" to the front of the phrase. I'm sure there are significant discrepancies with what actually happened in real life (there really are, though) and what happens in the film. Inventing some drama for the sake of the story does not make the film bad—I still like Cool Runnings—but it does make me a bit more aware of moments that seem like there is some forced emotion that may never have been there.
The Imitation Game starts in the early 50s with a police detective investigating Turing's activities and considering if he might be a Soviet spy. Since everything Turing did for the UK in the war was so secret, there is something of a historical blind spot in his record that makes him suspicious, in addition to the weird behavior he exhibits. Time spent in the 50s is limited, however, as this portion of the film doesn't serve a purpose other than a method of trying to show how Turing has physically and mentally suffered since the war's end.
The primary focus of the movie is Turing creating his computer to break the Enigma code at the secret military base in Bletchley Park in the UK, during the early 1940s while Britain was still losing the war with Germany. Cumberbatch channels some of his Sherlock anti-social attitude as Turing and makes everyone dislike him almost immediately. Whether Turing actually was liked or not, I have no idea, but I do know that the film does this so, at some point, he can grow more personable and they can all be more accepting of his quirkiness and become friends, aww.
Eventually, Joan Clarke (Keira Knightly) joins the team and manages to bring together Turing and his reluctant comrades as the great mediator. Her character is lauded as being brilliant at solving puzzles, but she doesn't do much of that in the film. In fact, she doesn't really help Turing with anything other than making friends. This is extremely irritating, considering the obvious pandering the film does with some misogynistic dialogue it has when her character is first introduced. Nice job at empowering women, movie! Too bad you didn't actually empower anyone because you didn't do anything with her character.
She's not even a fictional character like the love interest in Patch Adams. The filmmakers just didn't know what to do with her! Rather than focusing on Clarke's contributions to cracking codes, the filmmakers thought the friendship and short-lived engagement the two shared was more useful to the story they were trying to tell. Even that was not well written, however. The laziness of the writing around Clarke actually made me question if she was, in fact, a real person. When you have a real person like her, perfectly capable of serving as an empowering symbol of achievement for women in your movie, why squander the opportunity and not have them do something empowering? That's all I'm saying.
But I digress, as usual. Despite the near pointlessness of Knightly's character, her performance is perfectly commendable as are the rest of the supporting cast. Cumberbatch does a great job playing the stuttering, quirky Turing, as does Alex Lawther who plays the younger version of him in the 20s. It's too bad this movie is too caught up in trying to create character drama that isn't there with some really lazy, trite writing.
The sentimentality is so forced in this movie; at times, it made me gag. There is a cheesy line that the writers were clearly proud of because it is repeated multiple times throughout the movie as though it's some profound, heartfelt statement. At some point, Turing looks like he's about to be fired from the project, then his new buddies arrive and do the cheesy movie cliché of "If you're going to fire him, you're going to have to fire the rest of us." There is also a moment after the code has been cracked where a character, who has had less than a dozen lines in the film so far, makes an emotional plea for Turing to help him for the sake of his brother because "they're friends." I do not know why they chose to have this plea of friendship come from such a disposable character when there were plenty of other people in the room who could have done it and it would have been more meaningful. Maybe this event really happened, but if they were going for historical accuracy there, they chose the wrong time to do it.
Frankly, The Imitation Game is dragged down by its script. It's all trying so hard to make you cry without earning any of the emotion. The film comes across as lazy and dishonest, especially when it's trying to make more meaningful statements about how women and homosexuals were treated during this time. As good as Lawther was at playing the young Turing in his school days, I would have preferred that section of the film be removed just so we could get more of the period in which Turing is an unknown war hero who has been discarded by his country as a sexual deviant. That situation on its own is ripe with drama and meaningful moments, but it's barely glossed over in favor of just trying to make Turing a sad and lonely protagonist.
TL;DR (Conclusion)
The Imitation Game is a desperate attempt at using clichés and rote-writing tropes to evoke emotions and win awards. The end result is a hollow film that feels dishonest, disingenuous, and just flat-out lazy. Even with a strong cast and strong performances, the film cannot get out of the hole the script has dug for it.
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