imitation game movie

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Lawrence Wilkinson

    > If you're going to condense 5 years of military, academic and
    > engineering development into a movie then things are going to suffer.
    > I think they did a reasonably good job.

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