‘The Imitation Game’ captures spirit of Alan Turing

Taken from Wednesday’s edition of the Jason Rantz Show.

The Imitation Game, starring Keira Knightley and Benedict Cumberbatch, is going to be a big Oscar contender – or at least it’s being promoted that way.

Benedict Cumberbatch is a lock for getting an Oscar nomination for Best Actor and he deserves it.

The film is about one of the more fascinating characters in recent history – a guy named Alan Turing. There’s a book called Alan’s Cathedral, which is about this very peculiar guy – he was eccentric, weird, and different. He was gay at a time when it was against the law. Towards the end of his life, he got in trouble with the law. One of the punishments for the so-called deviants, who were, at that time, arrested in Britain, was they gave you hormone treatment that basically amounted to chemical castration.

This is demonstrated at the very beginning of the movie in a flashback about some of his early contributions. His main contribution was he led the group of people who broke the German code: Enigma.

We didn’t even know about all this until years after the war … because they were reading all of these messages from the German high command. The hard part was not letting the Germans know that they actually had this code.

It saved thousands of lives. The movie claims millions of lives, but that’s probably overstated.

Frankly, I haven’t read any of the full-length Turing biographies, but I think the movie stays true to the spirit of the man. There is even some physical resemblance that Cumberbatch is able to achieve.

What is fascinating is this is an individual who is very difficult to work with, he’s incredibly brilliant, and in many ways, he’s profoundly admirable. The complexity of the characterization is what makes the movie, plus it’s a phenomenally vivid recreation of wartime London.

The film works from beginning to end. It’s one of the better films of the year – I give it 3 1/2 stars.

Taken from Wednesday’s edition of the Jason Rantz Show.