The Imitation Game

[wildeabandon]

Yesterday evening I took a couple of hours out from my frantic World of Warcraft playing (a new expansion was just released, and inevitably it's eating my life and will continue doing so for the next couple of weeks) to go and see The Imitation Game, the new biopic about Alan Turing.

I know a lot of people don't much like Bandersnatch, but I'm definitely in the 'I totally would' camp. I was a bit worried based on the trailers though that the character would just be played as Sherlock Mark II, but it turns out that they'd just chosen the 2 minutes of most Sherlockey footage, and as it turned out his acting was nuanced and excellent.

It was pretty unremittingly bleak though, and even the positive moments were underscored by the sickening knowledge of how it was going to end, so only go if you're feeling fairly robust. Well worth it if you feel up to it though.

Comments

[sfred]

Thanks for writing it up. I wasn't sure whether I would want to see it, and this makes me think I do.

[highlyeccentric]

Is it true that they have played down the fact that he's, y'know, queer? I'm not baffled as to how they could do that, given how Turing ended up, but my corners of tghe internet have a hate on for the pre-release info on this grounds...

[obandsoller]

His queerness is key to plot, it's key to the theme of imitation. We don't get to see him banging any dudes, so it could be more played up, but I don't think it's fair to say it's played down.

[wildeabandon]

Yeah - I slightly disagree with Ramesh in that although the plot didn't make sense without it they could have made it considerably more central than it was, but it wasn't glossed over or hidden or anything.

[highlyeccentric]

Interesting. I guess Tumblr got its hate on because Cumbersnort was being typically snooty about why there wasn't any of that gay sex stuff. Tumblr does neatly divide into unquestioning cumberbitches and those who have a metre long list of reasons they hate him...

[atreic]

For me this came across at two levels (err, spoilers if you don't know Alan Turing's life story):

1) The whole movie is about Alan Turing not fitting in / being normal / having to hide who he is / his queerness. The closing story is him being arrested for being gay, and his treatment and suicide, all the flashbacks are his first love at school, the final message is pretty much straight 'this guy saved millions of lives and won the war for us, and we drove him to suicide for being gay' (As wildeabandon says, don't go if you're not feeling robust)

2) But the framing of the movie, and the way the story is told, is very much about the relationship between Alan Turing and Joan Clarke. Clarke's story is _awesome_, and one of the things I loved about the movie (kick-ass female mathematician trying to make it in male dominated world, being better even than the brilliant men, open minded view of love and relationships and how to make things work). But it does mean that the story ends up having lots of overtones of conventional heterosexual romance movies - 'Inept man with no friends meets brilliant woman who teaches him to be more socialy ept' etc etc, which I felt oddly conflicted about.