The Imitation Game

Grade: B
One-Liner: Imitating a war movie.

It's not often that a film title is as thoroughly fitting to its plot as The Imitation Game. The expertly-acted British World War II drama is, in fact, more of a look into the atrocities surrounding the treatment of homosexuals in the early 20th Century than it is a war film. However, nothing about the promotion of the movie or the storyline in the first half of the film would lead you to believe this.

Sure, Alan Turing (played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who has perfected his niche in playing the asshole genius) spends the majority of his tale trying to break the German code and help Britain and the Allies win the war, but it's mostly all done from a small room in a secluded part of England.

So when they (spoiler alert, but not really since this is a true story) eventually do break the code, it's hard to feel much. Just like Turing and his team, we saw the war through numbers and codes, not in lives lost or families destroyed.

It would have been much more compelling to follow a soldier through the war as Turing's story played out to give the audience more of an emotional attachment to the mathematician's final victory. Instead director Morten Tyldum chose to focus on the painful true story behind Turing's personal life as a closeted gay when homosexuality was illegal in Britain. Unfortunately, he chose to hone in on this particular aspect of the tale in the final 45 minutes, muddling the message and making for a rather depressing end.

Not that I fault depressing or realistic conclusions (I often prefer them), but it also took away from the hackers' triumphant findings. While that seems to be the point — considering Turing broke an unbreakable code, won a war, saved 14 million lives, and was still punished for being gay — it made for a confusing tale filled with unclear messages. And I'm not Alan Turing, so I didn't feel like deciphering them on a trip to the movies.