Today was my kid-free night and I went to the cinema. I saw Imitation game which I had high hopes for, but came away disappointed. Benedict Cumberbatch does a good job and is very believable, so when I came out of the cinema I felt pretty good about the movie. But the more distance I get and the more I have time to think about what the movie actually said and did, the less I like it. The story of Enigma and Alan Turing is told in such simplistic terms that it’s almost insulting.

According to the movie, Turing was a lone genius, totally socially inept. Recruited to help break the Enigma, he designed and built a great machine, working on it alone for something like two years, while the rest of the team mostly stood in his way and argued with him and his bosses tried to hinder him. (One wonders why they kept paying him all that time.) First the machine did not work, then he had another genius idea, and then it worked. Done! Whoo! Oh, and Turing also makes all the heroic decisions and choices.

He’s been squeezed into the mould of an immature nerd with no sense of humour and no social skills, making him almost a caricature – and to make this totally obvious everybody else is reduced to the role of ignorant hindrance.

Turing’s homosexuality is weirdly present but not present. On the one hand much is made of his first crush as a schoolboy, and the conviction for gross indecency that led to his downfall. But between those events, we see none of it. It’s like the movie is still stuck in the 1950s and tries to sweep homosexuality under the carpet.

While the movie seems to have been made with the aim of raising him from obscurity and showing him for the hero that he was, as well as wagging a finger at the homophobia of that time, it rather does the opposite. It manages to portray him as a victim rather than a hero (and in fact adds a subplot that would turn him into a traitor as well, if it had any basis in fact).