The Imitation Game. Rated M (mature themes). 114 minutes. Directed by Morten Tyldum. Screenplay by Graham Moore. Based on the novel by Andrew Hodges.
Verdict: A great story, perfectly told.
Truly great films, those rare beasts in which every single element merges into a flawlessly unified whole, have been sadly lacking in our cinemas. And it is not until a film like The Imitation Game comes along that you realise just how potentially short-changed we have been as film-loving audiences.
The Imitation Game begins by insisting that we pay attention in case we miss something. A direct address to an audience is an audacious start to 34 year-old Graham Moore’s superb debut feature-length screenplay. And as the captivating drama of all that follows carefully unfurls under Tyldum’s expert direction and Benedict Cumberbatch’s magnificent central performance, you find yourself disappearing into the story no matter how hard you might try to resist.
Charged with trying to work out how to decode Nazi Germany’s Enigma code, mathematics genius Alan Turing (Cumberbatch) and his colleagues work day and night inventing a machine that will be capable of deciphering the millions of coded messages being used by the German command to smash the allied naval forces during World War 2. The human brain, Turing declares, is too slow, and set against the backdrop of annihilation on the high seas, the code-breakers must race against time to give the allies greater opportunity to pre-empt the German attacks.
Within a uniformly outstanding ensemble, Keira Knightley is great as code-breaker Joan Clarke, with whom Turing would develop a profound and lasting relationship. The scene where she dismisses his anxiety-stricken declaration of his homosexuality is an absolute highpoint, and it is difficult to imagine that Cumberbatch could have been as good as he is without Knightley’s career-best supporting turn as his closest, and most important, confidante.
This review was commissioned by the West Australian Newspaper Group.
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