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Comment by herodotus | Hacker News Reader

For many, The Imitation Game is an entertaining movie. But it is a very distorted view of Bletchley Park and the code-breaking efforts that took part there. When I saw the movie, I found it very irritating (because the distortions were obvious to me). But most of the audience seemed to love it. There are many good critical articles about the movie (for example, https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/12/19/poor-imitation-alan...)

I am not surprised that people working on the Bombe did not know about the Enigma: this was a huge undertaking, with many sections. The Bletchley Park "Roll of Honour" lists all people known to have worked at Bletchley, or other locations on Signals Intelligence - there are well over 12,000 names on that roll.

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To me that movie's screenplay is the apotheosis of Hollywood writers' contempt for history, scientists and mathematicians, and their own audience. That the same screenplay actually won a fucking Oscar for "Best Adapted Screenplay" is a pretty sick joke.

It treats the actual facts of history as a worthless and inconvenient irrelevance. At every turn, reality is sacrificed, not even out of a necessary requirement to streamline the narrative, but because the truth fails to conform to the writer's prejudices, and the clichés of contemporary drama.

When presented with this dishonesty, writers usually issue some lame defence about reaching for a greater truth, but what they really mean is they lack the imagination or ability to distill the truth into a compelling story, or they simply don't care enough to try. So instead they feed their audiences warmed-over garbage, and win awards for it.

If you want the truth, watch a documentary. Fiction has ends in mind other than transmitting facts.

But shouldn’t a biopic in particular try to really get inside its subject?

Turing wasn’t even depicted as gay in the movie (apart from a couple of random comments).

And incredibly, they didn’t cover any of the details of his death. Apparently he was obsessed with Snow White, hence the apparent suicide (or experimental mix-up) with a poisoned apple. How could you make a Hollywood movie about his life and not even touch on his connection with one of the key Hollywood milestones? It’s very strange.

Apart from that, it persistently gave the impression that Turing was a lone genius and minimized the contributions of everybody else. That’s a mis-service to everyone, including Turing, who comes across as a very poor team player.

And apart from all that, I simply didn’t think it was a very good movie, taken as pure entertainment. I know people who loved it, though, so I realize opinions vary. It’s hard to separate my opinion from my biases around the treatment of the subject matter.

Other historical inaccuracies aside, the final scene was Turing's apparent suicide because he was castrated by the fucking government (for being gay). And the movie started with him have romantic feelings for another boy at boarding school. Turing's homosexuality seemed quite present throughout the movie I watched...

My complaint is of the “show, don’t tell” kind. We never see any other lovers, not even so much as a kiss.

The movie dances gingerly around the subject in a manner that’s the exact opposite of Turing himself, who seems to have been “out” to a dangerous degree (for the 40s and 50s). His friends warned him to be careful. None of that is in the movie.

Is it really a biopic though? Just not sure that was the objective of the film with respect to Turing's story. You could argue it would have seemed...gratuitous?? to allot significant time to his personal life in a movie primarily focused on telling the story (albeit with historical inaccuracies/omissions) of Turing's contributions to computer science (and more specifically to solving the enigma).

Honestly though I see your point, because they did show the flashbacks to his childhood as some sort of vague attempt at character development. Might it have been best to just not discuss it altogether? You could argue the story is "dramatic" enough without it (winning a war!). To try to do both in 1.5 hours or whatever is asking a lot.

There is precedent for all of this...it can be done and done well. The obvious comparison is "A Beautiful Mind" which takes a similar sort of framing story (brilliant academic's personal and professional life). They pulled it off there IMO and just weren't able to balance both here.

I find the opposite is often the case.

It's terrible as to the details, but that's movies for you.

Anyone wanting to know more should read "Alan Turing: The Enigma of Intelligence"[1]

Which the movie script is alleged to be based upon.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing:_The_Enigma

And then there's Rudy Rucker's Turing & Burroughs.[0]

> What if Alan Turing, founder of the modern computer age, escaped assassination by the secret service to become the lover of Beat author William Burroughs? What if they mutated into giant shapeshifting slugs, fled the FBI, raised Burroughs’s wife from the dead, and tweaked the H-bombs of Los Alamos? A wild beatnik adventure, compulsively readable, hysterically funny, with insane warps and twists—and a bad attitude throughout.

0) http://www.rudyrucker.com/turingandburroughs/

The Oscars are not awarded for historical accuracy. Best adapted screenplay does not mean most faithfully adapted, it just means the best screenplay which is adapted from some source (often fictional).

Hollywood is in the business of telling stories, not teaching history. If you get offended by lack of realism or accuracy, then don't watch Hollywood movies. I can't think of any Hollywood movie you couldn't criticize for twisting reality to further the narrative.

"Based on a true story" should always be taken with a large grain of salt and Hollywood itself have often satirized it - e.g. Fargo slapping a "Based on a true story" sign on a wholly fictional story, or American Hustle stating "Some of this actually happened!"

That was not his point. And I agree with him.

It doesnt have to be accurate but the script was just bad. It was basically the most typical misunderstood genius against the evil military industrial complex, with a woman lead who understands him.

Also a good adapted screenplay should adpot the most interesting unique parts, and not.just creat a generic new story with some of the same names.

The academy award is called "best adapted screenplay" and awards the best screenplay (by oscar standards) which happen to be an adaptation. Whether the adaption if faithful or improves of the source material is not a factor, only the resulting screenplay.

I'm not disputing the movie is cliched oscar-bait. That is the kind of movies the oscars awards.

Ah, the difference between best "adapted screenplay", vs. "best adapted" screenplay.

Exactly. Things like sequels as also classified as adapted. Borat got a nomination for best adapted screenplay because it was based on the character from the tv-show. But the screenplay is supposed to be judged on its own merit, the academy members is not required to have read the book or whatever.

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