This movie is a stunner. Set in England during WWII, Golden Globe Nominee Benedict Cumberbatch played Alan Turing, a bizarre but brilliant man. The whole story was well-crafted, illuminating the struggles of the war and just how many obstacles the Allies faced. Turing, an eccentric mathematics prodigy, leads the way with a group of cryptanalysts in the English’s efforts in cracking the Enigma, Nazi Germany’s genius code.
The movie is fraught with tension between Turing and his cohorts, Turing and himself and Turing and his fiancé, played by Keira Knightley. When Turing and his team are first put together, emotions run high and Turing and his teammates get along terribly, with his social failures and his supposedly futile working on a decoding machine. His teammates found the machine a worthless waste of time and money, and his team leader — Matthew Goode as Hugh Alexander — creates even more friction. If I’m to be truthful, I believe the movie didn’t introduce some prominent characters well enough, notably Peter Hilton.
Doubled with another plotline of Turing when he is persecuted for “Gross Indecency” for being homosexual when he is older, you see another side of Turing the war campaign does not shine on. Throughout the movie Turing is also haunted with flashbacks of his miserable life as a child, and the one friend he had.
If I were to give this movie a score out of 100, it would be a 97. This movie was excellently crafted and thrilling for everyone. It bends your whole perception of the war, and you understand just how monumental the efforts to defeat Germany had to be.