If the former's what they'd done, I'd agree. (And I can think of historical movies that have done that, and still produced a movie that was both very watchable, and reasonably accurate; e.g. in "The Gathering Storm", they've made Ralph Wigram stand in for a bunch of people, including him, who fed data to Churchill. I can live with that; too many characters would just confuse the average viewer.) But the Imitation Game writer(s) did a lot more than that. E.g. the whole bogus 'Turing versus his Blimpian manager who wanted to shut his project down' meme. That's completely bogus, 173 degrees out of phase with the truth, and clearly added purely to give, well, I'm not sure what. The thing is that what he and the others at BP (although he was primus inter pares, there were others such as Welchman, Tutte, etc who made massive, remarkable additions - and, as you point out, in the end it was an industrial-scale enterprise) did was so amazing, and they had to struggle against such difficulties, they didn't _need_ to 'sex up' the plot with that kind of stupid cliche. As far as I'm concerned, all those lame hackneyed plot elements just prove that the script-writer(s) were distinctly third-rate - because if they were actually any good, there's more than enough powerful material in Turing's actual story to make a much, much better movie, without relying on that kind of pathetic bilge. Noel