I find the prospect of reviewing The Imitation Game so dreary I can hardly bare it.

This movie takes the very interesting story of how the Nazi Enigma code was broken, and turns it into a tedious harangue, the sole purpose of which is to advance the bizarre and patronizing thesis that “autistic gays should be treated with respect, because they can be geniuses” (merely being human isn’t quite enough, apparently). The film advances this thesis by presenting Alan Turing as a tragic figure of near-cosmic proportions, a emotionally crippled soul suffering from homosexuality, autism, and mechanophilia, who, despite the scorn and misunderstanding of the world, as well as the the obstructionism and hatred of all his colleagues and commanding officers, managed to win World War II all by himself. There was a time when audiences and critics would not so readily swallow such insipid, manipulative crap; clearly that time has past.

The Imitation Game is in many ways a giant lie. The real Alan Turing did not suffer from Aspergers, at least not in any significant way, nor was he a friendless snob with no sense of humor. By all accounts he was a warm and friendly guy who had good relationships with his colleagues. He was gay, but was never guilty of espionage resulting from his being blackmailed on account of his sexuality, as this film claims. He was not despised by his commanding officers, nor did they actively impede him in his code-breaking work. He did not invent his “thinking machine” from scratch, all by himself; basic versions of the machine had already been invented and built by Polish cryptographers, to which Turing made substantial and important refinements – he redesigned it assuming the existence of a “crib”, or a predictable bunch of text repeated in every message (although the Polish cryptographers had already exploited this same idea to a limited extent.) There were also hundreds of these machines, hidden all over England for safety, not one lone machine named “Christopher”, bearing the entire burden of the world, and which Turing later adopts as a kind of life partner! Even Turing’s supposed suicide is in fact a moot issue, historically. And the concept of the “imitation game”, which refers to the various “Turing tests” of a machine’s ability to “think”, is in this movie warped into manifestation of Turing’s supposed mental illness!

What explains this nonsense? Clearly these filmmakers could not see any way to make a movie about code-breaking interesting, which I find quite pathetic. But why go to such ridiculous extremes in bastardizing the story and its central character? Why make Turing into a fictional monster who, Christ-like, gives himself for his fellow man? These questions defy answers, I’m afraid, and the response of the film’s director (“A lot of historical films sometimes feel like people reading a Wikipedia page to you onscreen … Our goal was to give you ‘What does Alan Turing feel like?'”) is simply insulting. They should have stuck with the Wikipedia page!

Setting aside the film’s depiction of Turing, we find the entire rest of the film little more than a shoddily assembled afterthought. It lumbers forward gracelessly, virtually every scene a stupid chiche. The dialog is atrocious, and the supporting casting and acting is painfully bad (poor Charles Dance looks humiliated by the lines he had to deliver.) As for the main performances, Benedict Cumberbatch is an actor that I really feel I should like, but just don’t. I’ll admit, he does a lot of great stammering in this film, and makes a lot of weird, unattractive faces, both of which will probably guarantee him the Oscar for Best Actor, but I can’t really say I got much of a sense of this highly fictionalized Alan Turing from his performance (other than he was “on the spectrum”, and a fucking jerk). And I can’t believe that Keira Knightley got an Oscar nomination for her performance, as it’s practically the only bad performance I’ve ever seen her give! It’s a grim, joyless performance, completely devoid of any attempt at verisimilitude. And the fact that she looks like a sexy space alien (google what Joan Clarke actually looked like) just makes matters worse.

Put simply, The Imitation Game is an abomination.

PS: Considering that the Computer Engineer Barbie book was recently pulled from shelves and its author vilified for corrupting the minds of young women, because in the story Barbie collaborates with men, what are we to make of this film’s portrayal of Joan Clarke as a glorified secretary good at crossword puzzles, who basically does nothing but serve as Alan Turing’s beard, when in fact she was an actual mathematician, recruited as a mathematician by the head of the decryption unit (not by Turing), and was a leading member who actually headed up her own group? Why isn’t The Imitation Game being pilloried for corrupting the minds of young women?!