The Imitation Game [Blu-ray]

Alan Turing (1912-54) is no longer alive to forgive us, adding to the remorse some feel in needing to be forgiven by him. This complication arises because a great wrong was done to a great man in a time of great ignorance and intolerance. Hounded and persecuted, he was driven to suicide at age 41 by a perverse morality that criminalised him for his nature — that of preferring the intimate company of men over women. Why should this have mattered? It didn’t, or shouldn’t have. So it’s a question many still ask and are troubled by.Among other things, Turing was a hero and mathematical genius. He helped save Britain and defeat the Nazis in the Second World War, invented the computer and AI, and was the first to apply mathematics to the studies of zoology and botany, discovering why, for instance, the leopard has spots and the zebra stripes. He called this process morphogenesis, the study of the shapes and patterns in living organisms.During the war he was recruited from Cambridge by MI5 to work at Bletchley Park, the secretive but now famous intelligence-gathering unit tasked with breaking the “unbreakable” German military code called Enigma. The problem looked insurmountable because the permutations of Enigma were nearly endless, millions of combinations of code changed daily by the code senders. A human mind, or series of human minds working in concert together, might take weeks to run through the combinations with paper and pencil. But weeks were useless when Enigma’s settings could be changed daily (and were) by the Germans. Thus Britain was gradually losing the war to this sinister machine, its warships and destroyers routinely a step behind that of the German U-boats at sea.So Turing thought the obvious: if human minds can’t solve the riddle, maybe a machine can. But none existed. It would have to be invented. Thus out of desperation and the visions of a genius the computer was born, a machine that could compute (meaning think) faster than humans can. Some say Turing and his machine represent the biggest shift in human culture since Gutenberg. The returns are still coming in, but it seems so. Our human world now is constructed on digitalised information. Even our money is invisible, primarily stored as binary code in the minds of computers, not as banknotes in vaults. The machines are already on the way to running the show. A time is coming when your flight from London to New York will be flown without a pilot and you’ll think nothing of it.In 1950, Turing wrote an article on AI called The Imitation Game, generally understood to be a synonym for the Turing Test. His central question was: “Can machines think?” And by that he really meant: “Can machines imitate or mimic human thought so well that a human observer might be fooled into thinking the machine is human?” The question is important because a lot hinges on the answer. If, for instance, the observer can be fooled, what’s next? What does this imply for man and civilisation? We can’t answer it yet, but we know enough already to be unsettled by the question.Turing logically implies in his paper that AI was made inevitable by the construction of computing machines (computers). There’s no turning back, in other words, to a time of previous innocence before the machines existed. Human intellect, he also implies, is no match for the exponential intellectual powers of machines. Thus he was among the first to see into the future. He also foresaw that AI would force redefinitions of humanity on us, and this is exactly where we are at the moment — absorbed in a philosophical revolution of thought whose manifestations cannot be read yet with any authority.Turing, much like Einstein, was a worrier. He understood better than most the Pandora’s box his mind was opening up. Even now many are way behind on the learning curve. To them AI is just a form of sci-fi entertainment. But it won’t be so entertaining in the future when the terminators are programmed to terminate us if they can be, and you can be sure that some humans among us will try, human mendacity and history being what it is.This film does not spend its time going into all this, but the genesis of it is there just the same. What we mostly see is the struggle of a brilliant mind with the incomprehensible, with a problem so difficult it may as well be impossible. That he could solve it is almost beyond belief, a god-like accomplishment with few precedents. Radar helped win the war — this is true. Likewise heroic were the RAF and the Americans at D-Day and beyond. But without Turing and his team the Nazi menace might have trampled over all of us. We’ll never know, and we can thank Turing for it.Benedict Cumberbatch received an Oscar nomination for his turn as Turing. Seeing the film you can understand why. We’ll never know in detail who Alan Turing was because he can’t be duplicated. But put on your blindfold and maybe Cumberbatch passes another kind of Turing Test — the one of becoming Alan Turing. I doubt a better effort can be made. Derek Jacobi is wonderful in an earlier version of the Turing story (Breaking the Code, 1996). But Cumberbatch raises the bar even higher, so to speak.What he brings as Turing is what Turing himself must have brought — manic determination, a will to succeed that defies logic. The demons he fights are many and various: Hitler, the Enigma, time, his superiors, budget constraints, his own health, sexuality, nerves, doubts and the finite number of grey cells in his brain. The key that opens the door must fit a million locks or more. He’s essentially told it can’t be unlocked, yet is ordered to find a way to open it. If we want to turn to myth, Odysseus on his long, hazardous voyage provides a good image. His goal is the Golden Fleece, heretofore unfound by all mortals who have sought it. Odysseus, as we know, perseveres. So does Turing.The Golden Fleece moment in the film, if it can be called that, doesn’t come at Bletchley proper where all the hard work is being done. Creativity seldom works this way, as it’s far more stealthy in spirit. Inspiration, as most artists and thinkers know, arrives from unexpected quarters: not from the studio or blackboard, but from the bath tub, say, or from a dream or walk in the park with the dog. Turing’s moment, modestly and homely enough, came in a British pub. He and his colleagues were unwinding after yet another long, draining, exasperating day in code with the dreadful Germans. Then, just like that, over beers, the epiphany arrived via a stray comment made by a fellow English decoder at their table.Turing freezes, stares into a place of insight hidden from the others. The eyes widen and in them we see wonder and recognition. He jumps from his seat and shouts dementedly, “Germany has just lost the bloody the war!” Beer is spilt, the tab unpaid, the code breakers dashing up the path to Bletchley. There they race past security guards, then to their ciphers and the huge computing machine Turing has nicknamed Christopher (after his dearest schoolboy friend whose young death Turing never got over). It’s the world’s first prototype computer. They input new information into it. Rotors rotate and millions of numbers continue to spin. Then the rotors click into place and stop, the entire machine coming to a peaceful halt. This hasn’t happened before. The codebreakers, breathless, look at the machine, then at themselves.They take the sequence of numbers given to them by Christopher and type a sequence of letters into their Enigma (gifted to them by the Polish Navy which scavenged it from a German vessel in the Baltic). Out comes a coded message in German, a weather report for the North Atlantic at 6:00 a.m. along with coordinates for an attack on British ships in the area.Code broken. Minds trying to absorb the fact. Stunned silence. Disbelief. Then rapturous joy and tearful embraces. Turing looks exhausted, as befits a man who has just won the war for Britain and its Allies. From here on out Germany will have no secrets, Enigma no longer enigmatic. The sell-by date of the Thousand Year Reich has come rather earlier than expected.This film is a celebration of many things — of genius, ingenuity, improvisation, faith, determination, perseverance and heroism. It’s also a morality tale of good and evil, virtue versus vice.But in ironic counterpoint to the heroism of Turing is the callousness and cowardice of the British establishment in its treatment of him after the war. Yes, he was brilliant and we acknowledge his contribution to the war effort, thinks the government. But we must be practical and realistic. The war is over but a new one is on our hands now with the Russians. Turing is unpredictable, hard to control, a loose cannon. His access to sensitive intelligence makes him potentially dangerous, a liability to be closely monitored. Who knows who he is consorting with, as we’re very aware of his deviancies in private life? Why is he making these trips to Norway, Switzerland, and other strange places most Britons do not visit?These events are not shown in the film but underpin the suspicion the government has toward Turing. None who worked at Bletchley were allowed to talk. Ever. As in perpetuity. They were sworn to secrecy under the Official Secrets Act.Sometimes all that’s needed to destroy a person is enough doubt and suspicion. The government would not have wanted Turing dead, but it succeeded indirectly in killing him through harassment that led to his suicide.Since those awful cold-war times the government has tried to make amends publicly. In 2009 it apologised for the “appalling” way in which Turing had been treated after the war. Then in 2013 Queen Elizabeth II signed a pardon, overturning his 1952 conviction of gross indecency.In addition, there have been posthumous honours bestowed on him from universities and research institutions around the world, far too numerous to list here.But another mildly amusing indication of his fame in recent years in his inclusion in the list of 100 Greatest Britons (conducted by public polling in 2002). He ranks no. 21 on it, higher than the two Davids (Bowie and Beckham, nos. 29 and 33, respectively), but lower than Princess Diana (no. 3), a person thought to be more important in the cultural life and history of Britain than Charles Darwin (no. 4), William Shakespeare (no. 5) and Sir Isaac Newton (no. 6). Of course on one level it’s quite silly, frivolous and pitiful, as most similar lists are. But not entirely. It does mean he is known, remembered and appreciated by the public, at least in Britain, so his gifts and accomplishments have not been completely lost to the world. In fact, his public profile has never been higher, as the making of this film probably attests.We can’t go back to right the wrongs of the past, but maybe an important step toward not repeating them with others is to publicly acknowledge them as wrong. In this sense Turing lives on as a symbol of much needed tolerance and acceptance. And so, at the risk of sounding maudlin, we can say we’re thankful for what he did for us and sorry for what we did to him.Finally, I apologise for not writing more directly about the film. I thought it more important to say some cogent things about Turing than to analyse the film in detail, thinking readers can go to other reviews to get descriptions of it. But I’ll close by saying it’s beautiful, deserving of both five stars and, more importantly, all the awards it has received, including an Academy Award. You will not be disappointed. Or I hope you aren’t. I found it deeply moving.

Benedict Cumberbatch is superb in the role of Alan Turing. Turing saved countless lives during the war with his invention of his decoding machine, but was treated appallingly by the British State afterwards because of his homosexuality. A Royal Pardon for his sentence was given decades later, but that would have been little comfort for the man himself who committed suicide aged just 41. Britain owes so much to this brilliant man. I can highly recommend this film to anyone who wishes to see someone who has such self-belief in what he is doing that he will fight all odds to achieve his aims.

Great acting in a very interesting film in more ways than one

I have to admit that it was only in the 80's that I became aware of Alan Turing and his work. And that, ironically enough, was through a stage play called Breaking the Rules.This film goes further into the debt that the Allies owed to Turing and his co-workers and makes the tragedy of the homophobia that led to his early death even more stark.It has its flaws. I don't think that the Keira Kneightley story line was successful. It smacked of trying to combine some sort of perverse desire to incorporate an acceptable "love interest" with a lame attempt to acknowledge the efforts of the women who worked at Bletchley. That may be unjust, but that's how it came across to me.But overall it's an interesting, and, I think, an important film, which in some quarters has been dismissed as just one more example of a bio-pic about "another handicapped white male genius".That view of the movie appalled me on two fronts.For one thing, in a society which still shrinks from any form of physical or mental handicap and seems to wish to pigeon hole the afflicted into little boxes and leave them there, I think there is a place for films which demonstrate people who are actually handicapped overcoming those odds to achieve success in their chosen field. It's trivialising the issues involved to the extreme to simply dismiss such movies because the people involved happen to be white males.But more critically, it simply outraged me that the writer who threw out the comment was so ignorant or so bigoted or just plain stupid that they considered Turing's homosexuality as a "handicap" in any but a social sense. To class homosexuality, as they did, with Hawking's ALS or Nash's schizophrenia is simply abhorrent, and actually demonstrates even more the need for such movies, because that thinking belongs back in the 50's when Turing was treated to abysmally by the country he had helped, perhaps more than any other individual, to save.

It must be a great book for those who have a certain degree of computer programming knowledge. I am not one of those folks, however, I still enjoyed reading some parts of it where the development of the rudimentary computing device was narrated. My five stars do not represent a true appreciation of the book and I would not recommend it for people who are not well versed in computers.