The beginnings of a review of The Imitation Game (2014)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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28 December
* Contains some spoilers *
This has the beginnings of a review of The Imitation Game (2014)
Section 1 of Alan Turing's paper is headed 'The imitation game', but its title is 'Computing machinery and intelligence', @ImitationGame...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 31, 2014It was not the first visit to Bletchley Park (@BParkPodcast), but a friend who had not already been and who came to an excellent amateur production (at The ADC Theatre (@adctheatre)) of Hugh Whitemore’s Breaking the Code was then taken there that same weekend : we easily agreed, seeing The Imitation Game (2014) together (@ImitationGame), that it could have given no such impetus, because it is best watched by someone knowing little about BP or Alan Turing (and unprepared to know more) :
One wishes to be wrong, but The @ImitationGame (2014) seems no more likely than Enigma (2001) to cause people to visit @BParkPodcast ->
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 28, 2014It is fanciful in the extreme to show people trying to crack a code who not only have no notion what would / should happen, if they did so, but who are also – in consequence, and as if such decisions could would be left to them – left squabbling about what to do.
Not only that, but it is presented as if, finding out in the middle of the night on the edge of what is now Milton Keynes in the early 1940s, that someone’s mother is about to be eaten by a shark on a remote beach, one can simply summon up a passing shark-hunter (via the offices of the beneficent Steven Spielberg, no doubt)…
-> Falsifying facts in The @ImitationGame about Turing's war, the bombe machine, Hugh Alexander, etc. does not even serve a good story ->
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 28, 2014-> Justified by the 'twisted genius' slant (e.g. of A Beautiful Mind (2001)), to hell with how, with whom and when Enigma was broken ->
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 28, 2014-> Just to make out that Turing - alongside Mark Strong (as a creepier Jeremy Northamthan Enigma's (2001)) - decided who lived or died...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 28, 2014Some film-posters make more fanciful claims than others :
Only by oddly defining 'British' (or 'film') is @ImitationGame 'The best British film of the year' (poster), @dimensionsmovie - Mr.Turner ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 27, 2014The worst thing about the film (because there were not just half-a-dozen codebreakers, and only one woman amongst them) was also a source of the best : Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) reaching out to what he found kindred in Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), and the sense of their valuing and encouraging (the best in) each other.
Though, that said, it did feel as if one had been there before, with the premiere of Dimensions : A Line, A Loop, A Tangle of Threads, at Cambridge Film Festival (@camfilmfest / #CamFF) in 2011… :
Not uniquely, @dimensionsmovie, but more than a little reminded of Stephen and Annie by @imitationgame (2014)...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 27, 2014Period touches in Graham Moore's script for The @ImitationGame - such as KeiraKnightley (as Joan Clarke) three times exclaiming O My God ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 28, 2014Of course, depressing a key on an Enigma machine, and seeing the correlate light up, beats The @ImitationGame, too : http://t.co/7gOTiDec2v
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 28, 2014Of course, the film has a number of good things about it, from Alexandre Desplat's score settling down nicely, after seeming too prominently like the tappings of Morse Code (even if he is made to over-egg the sentiment at the end ?), to evoking in miniatures the horrors and hypocrisy of Sherborne, but they feel in the significant minority.
Quite a fun, knowing review, from Michael Phillips at @chicagotribune, of The @ImitationGame... : http://t.co/C1t1WrovKh
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 28, 2014Geoff Pevere, in The @globeandmail, is also quite interesting about The @ImitationGame : http://t.co/y7GCR57CBt
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 28, 2014So the friend (a former animator) had the same reservations about the doom-laden flights / convoys in impossibly tight formations - that they were designed to have an instant content for those who know nothing about The Second World War, and sought thereby to make a virtue of their alien look and qualities* :
Oh, and the CGI in The @ImitationGame and what, despite achieving period costume / scenes (as people flee The Blitz), it inaptly connotes !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 28, 2014End-notes
* Almost as if machines themselves were waging war, whilst, quite clearly in the editing, we have counterpointed the quiet, calm Turing (supposedly infuriating everyone's patience by being unnecessarily fastidious), but biding his time to rob such machines of their brutal power with a different sort and class of machine...
Yawn ! (Facile sub-Matrix juxtaposition to enliven any in the audience who are uninformed about Turing (and who he was for our times) with a subliminal notion of those things, i.e. that he is Neo to Agent Smith's machine-world...)
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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