Dreadful
So at the weekend forestgreenivy and I went to see the movie The Imitation Game which is a Bio-Pic based on the life of Alan Turing.
Alan Turing was a brilliant mathematician who was the person who first came up with the ideas behind modern computers. During World War Two he was also one of the team at Bletchley Park who broke the German military encryption and is credited by historians with probably shortening the war by around two years and saving perhaps as many as 14 million lives in the process.
Unfortunately Turing was homosexual in a period when the British Government considered such acts illegal and after the war he was required to take hormone treatments to "cure" this illness which led to severe depression and he ended up taking his own life at the age of 41. It is, in my opinion, one of the most disgusting miscarriages of justice in British history. One that is hardly ameliorated by his recent, posthumous, royal pardon by Queen Elizabeth II for his crime of being homosexual.
The film stars Benedict Cumberbatch, an actor I've been impressed by in other roles, notably Sherlock and has received very favourable reviews, so I was looking forward to seeing it.
All of which conspired to make my disappointment all the more when I saw how dreadful the movie was. Not from the acting or direction which were I thought superb, but from the plot. As always with a movie you expect the writers to take the occasional liberty with the actual events in order to make the movie more entertaining. But this movie went far beyond that and had little, if anything to do with the actual events. Some real events were included but they were twisted to become very different from reality, most of the movie was just outright fiction.
For those bothered by spoilers you may not want to read the rest of this but I thought I'd list some of the major inaccuracies I saw.
The movie has three main timelines in Alan Turing's life, his time at school and his discovery of himself as a homosexual, his time during the war breaking German codes, and a period in 1951 when he's investigated by the police for the crime of homosexuality.
I have read biographies of Turing, but remember little about his childhood, so I'll allow the possibility that it is accurately portrayed.
The war period section starts in 1939 with Turing being interviewed for a job at Bletchley to help break the supposedly unbreakable German Enigma codes. Which is were we depart from reality in a major way. Largely because the codes had already been broken. The British had been working on trying to break them, unsuccessfully, since the mid thirties. But over in Poland three brilliant Polish mathematicians had managed to break the code. They gave those secrets to the British government before the war started. They also gave the British a copy of the machine they'd designed to automate breaking the codes.
So the movie spends the next three years with the codes unbroken and Turing working on designing a machine to break them. The only mention of the Poles who actually did this is when Turing says he based his machine on a Polish machine but his is better. So the movie has the British spending years trying to break the codes, which in reality had already been broken. In real history Turing was designing a much more sophisticated machine than the Polish one to dramatically speed up the code breaking.
The movie also points out a problem with breaking Enigma is that the settings change every 24 hours and so you have to start again each day. This is true as far as it goes. But the movie shows a clock reaching midnight, an alarm going off and with the codes unbroken people down tools to start again on the new day's messages. OK I'll allow artistic license on the midnight although obviously Germany was in a different time zone to the British so the change wouldn't occur at midnight. But the rest is plain stupid. The fact you've not broken yesterday's messages at midnight doesn't make the information in them useless. Ideally messages will be broken quickly but even messages weeks or months old may give important clues as to how the Germans are thinking or planning future attacks.
The movie also ignores the reality that there wasn't just one setting each day, but that each unit used different settings, not just the Navy (Kriegsmarine) had different settings to the Airforce (Luftwaffe), but that, for example individual groups within the Luftwaffe would have different settings, so the Luftwaffe alone would have dozens of codes to be broken each day.
The movie also ignores the problems of breaking the Kriegsmarine codes, crucial in 1940-1941 as the German U-Boats are strangling British supply lines. The Kriegsmarine codes were not broken by the Poles as they were more sophisticated than the rest used by the Germans in that their Enigma had four rotors rather than the three used by all other arms of the German military. An issue that made then vastly more difficult to break. But something that Turing did succeed in doing.
The movie has a big sub plot in the man in charge at Bletchley, Denniston, trying to have Turing fired from the team. This is entirely fictional and Denniston was key to organising the resources to efficiently break the codes and distribute those messages. But this allows for a big point in the movie where Turing personally writes to Churchill asking for money for his project. This is a major reworking of the actual event.
What actually happened was Churchill visited Bletchley in 1940 to tell the people there how important their work was and how many lives they were saving. The movie can't include that scene as in the movie timeline the codes haven't yet been broken. While Churchill is making his speech he includes a comment to the effect "If there's anything I an do to help please let me know". Knowing they need more staff the actual letter was written by four people (Stuart Milner-Barry, Hugh Alexander, Gordon Welchman and Turing). The letter was mainly requesting staff not money for Turing's machine. Churchill immediately authorised the extra staff.
A crucial point in the movie is when Turing is at a party and a woman who's been recording German messages says she knows the first five characters of one message are some German's girlfriends name. Knowing that in 1943 Turing can apply that knowledge and we finally break the Enigma.
OK the first point is annoying. The actual number of header characters is six, not five. Why they got that wrong is a mystery. But in reality the number had to be even as three characters are sent in one setting and the next three are sent in a second setting. This being a key to breaking Enigma is true, as is the fact that a lot of Germans rather than using, as they'd been instructed to, six random characters, regularly used the same characters, including girlfriends names. But this technique wasn't discovered in 1943, the Poles had in fact found it before the war and used it to break the codes.
But now finally, the movie has the team reading German codes. They decode the day's messages and realise an attack is about to occur on a convoy. Turing then realises that to save the convoy would risk the Germans knowing the codes had been broken and the Germans could within a couple of days develop a new code which couldn't be broken.
Ok, lets switch to reality, firstly saving one convoy wouldn't have the effect mentioned as there would be other ways the Allies could have learnt of the attack. The issue would only arise if every convoy was saved. In reality by 1943 the U-Boats had been all but defeated largely because the Allies were saving every convoy, in the manner the movie shows Turing concerned about. But the Allies had "leaked" secrets so the Germans believed the Allies were tracking U-Boats through technology more sophisticated than they in fact had. The Germans were suspicious their codes were broken but their cryptanalysts insisted that was impossible.
The second point is the movie says the Germans could change their encryption techniques within days. That is just rubbish and completely fails to appreciate just how difficult it is to design encryption techniques and how much time it would take having designed such techniques to distribute the new technology and train staff in its use.
But the biggest issue is that Bletchley Park did not make those decisions. As the scene points out having broken the German codes it was important to keep the Germans unaware of this. Decisions were made about which information to act on and which had to be ignored to protect the source. There's a famous event that occurred during the Battle of Britain, in 1940, when the Germans launched a surprise night attack on Coventry. Engima (in reality broken then although the movie would have us believe it wasn't broken for several more years) warned of the attack, Churchill is supposed to have ordered the attack not be intercepted to protect the secret of the Enigma decrypts. But the point is no one at Bletchley Park, including Turing, was involved in such decisions, they just provided the decrypts.
All of which makes the next scene in the movie where Turing explains to MI6 what to do and how to keep the secret of Enigma entirely fictional.
The war section of the movie ends there. The final section of the movie deals with the event in the 1950's which led to Turing being forced to take hormone therapy. In the movie he's shown as having been burgled and the police becoming suspicious and although their investigating Turing as a suspected Russian spy they uncover his homosexuality and arrest him for that.
The reality was very different, Turing was indeed burgled as shown in the movie by a man he'd picked up and paid for homosexual sex. However when Turing went to the police about the burglary he was immediately honest about how he'd met the man and how he'd obtained access to Turing's apartment. The police considered the burglary to be difficult to solve and weren't that bothered by a man stealing from homosexuals, they did however immediately arrest Turing as a self confessed homosexual.
This makes the entire set of scenes related to their investigation pure fiction.
The movie ends with some text on screen giving some details as to what happened later. In one piece they say the secret of the British having broken enigma was kept for 50 years. Again this is just a meaningless lie, the actual secret came out in 1974 (less than 30 years after the war ended) when Winterbotham publish his book The Ultra Secret which was all about how Enigma had been broken and used.
When I watch a movie apparently based on an historical event I expect some artistic license, but in general I also expect the movie to in general stick to the events. IMHO this is one of the worst war movies ever made for its appalling treatment of the facts.
Alan Turing was a brilliant mathematician who was the person who first came up with the ideas behind modern computers. During World War Two he was also one of the team at Bletchley Park who broke the German military encryption and is credited by historians with probably shortening the war by around two years and saving perhaps as many as 14 million lives in the process.
Unfortunately Turing was homosexual in a period when the British Government considered such acts illegal and after the war he was required to take hormone treatments to "cure" this illness which led to severe depression and he ended up taking his own life at the age of 41. It is, in my opinion, one of the most disgusting miscarriages of justice in British history. One that is hardly ameliorated by his recent, posthumous, royal pardon by Queen Elizabeth II for his crime of being homosexual.
The film stars Benedict Cumberbatch, an actor I've been impressed by in other roles, notably Sherlock and has received very favourable reviews, so I was looking forward to seeing it.
All of which conspired to make my disappointment all the more when I saw how dreadful the movie was. Not from the acting or direction which were I thought superb, but from the plot. As always with a movie you expect the writers to take the occasional liberty with the actual events in order to make the movie more entertaining. But this movie went far beyond that and had little, if anything to do with the actual events. Some real events were included but they were twisted to become very different from reality, most of the movie was just outright fiction.
For those bothered by spoilers you may not want to read the rest of this but I thought I'd list some of the major inaccuracies I saw.
The movie has three main timelines in Alan Turing's life, his time at school and his discovery of himself as a homosexual, his time during the war breaking German codes, and a period in 1951 when he's investigated by the police for the crime of homosexuality.
I have read biographies of Turing, but remember little about his childhood, so I'll allow the possibility that it is accurately portrayed.
The war period section starts in 1939 with Turing being interviewed for a job at Bletchley to help break the supposedly unbreakable German Enigma codes. Which is were we depart from reality in a major way. Largely because the codes had already been broken. The British had been working on trying to break them, unsuccessfully, since the mid thirties. But over in Poland three brilliant Polish mathematicians had managed to break the code. They gave those secrets to the British government before the war started. They also gave the British a copy of the machine they'd designed to automate breaking the codes.
So the movie spends the next three years with the codes unbroken and Turing working on designing a machine to break them. The only mention of the Poles who actually did this is when Turing says he based his machine on a Polish machine but his is better. So the movie has the British spending years trying to break the codes, which in reality had already been broken. In real history Turing was designing a much more sophisticated machine than the Polish one to dramatically speed up the code breaking.
The movie also points out a problem with breaking Enigma is that the settings change every 24 hours and so you have to start again each day. This is true as far as it goes. But the movie shows a clock reaching midnight, an alarm going off and with the codes unbroken people down tools to start again on the new day's messages. OK I'll allow artistic license on the midnight although obviously Germany was in a different time zone to the British so the change wouldn't occur at midnight. But the rest is plain stupid. The fact you've not broken yesterday's messages at midnight doesn't make the information in them useless. Ideally messages will be broken quickly but even messages weeks or months old may give important clues as to how the Germans are thinking or planning future attacks.
The movie also ignores the reality that there wasn't just one setting each day, but that each unit used different settings, not just the Navy (Kriegsmarine) had different settings to the Airforce (Luftwaffe), but that, for example individual groups within the Luftwaffe would have different settings, so the Luftwaffe alone would have dozens of codes to be broken each day.
The movie also ignores the problems of breaking the Kriegsmarine codes, crucial in 1940-1941 as the German U-Boats are strangling British supply lines. The Kriegsmarine codes were not broken by the Poles as they were more sophisticated than the rest used by the Germans in that their Enigma had four rotors rather than the three used by all other arms of the German military. An issue that made then vastly more difficult to break. But something that Turing did succeed in doing.
The movie has a big sub plot in the man in charge at Bletchley, Denniston, trying to have Turing fired from the team. This is entirely fictional and Denniston was key to organising the resources to efficiently break the codes and distribute those messages. But this allows for a big point in the movie where Turing personally writes to Churchill asking for money for his project. This is a major reworking of the actual event.
What actually happened was Churchill visited Bletchley in 1940 to tell the people there how important their work was and how many lives they were saving. The movie can't include that scene as in the movie timeline the codes haven't yet been broken. While Churchill is making his speech he includes a comment to the effect "If there's anything I an do to help please let me know". Knowing they need more staff the actual letter was written by four people (Stuart Milner-Barry, Hugh Alexander, Gordon Welchman and Turing). The letter was mainly requesting staff not money for Turing's machine. Churchill immediately authorised the extra staff.
A crucial point in the movie is when Turing is at a party and a woman who's been recording German messages says she knows the first five characters of one message are some German's girlfriends name. Knowing that in 1943 Turing can apply that knowledge and we finally break the Enigma.
OK the first point is annoying. The actual number of header characters is six, not five. Why they got that wrong is a mystery. But in reality the number had to be even as three characters are sent in one setting and the next three are sent in a second setting. This being a key to breaking Enigma is true, as is the fact that a lot of Germans rather than using, as they'd been instructed to, six random characters, regularly used the same characters, including girlfriends names. But this technique wasn't discovered in 1943, the Poles had in fact found it before the war and used it to break the codes.
But now finally, the movie has the team reading German codes. They decode the day's messages and realise an attack is about to occur on a convoy. Turing then realises that to save the convoy would risk the Germans knowing the codes had been broken and the Germans could within a couple of days develop a new code which couldn't be broken.
Ok, lets switch to reality, firstly saving one convoy wouldn't have the effect mentioned as there would be other ways the Allies could have learnt of the attack. The issue would only arise if every convoy was saved. In reality by 1943 the U-Boats had been all but defeated largely because the Allies were saving every convoy, in the manner the movie shows Turing concerned about. But the Allies had "leaked" secrets so the Germans believed the Allies were tracking U-Boats through technology more sophisticated than they in fact had. The Germans were suspicious their codes were broken but their cryptanalysts insisted that was impossible.
The second point is the movie says the Germans could change their encryption techniques within days. That is just rubbish and completely fails to appreciate just how difficult it is to design encryption techniques and how much time it would take having designed such techniques to distribute the new technology and train staff in its use.
But the biggest issue is that Bletchley Park did not make those decisions. As the scene points out having broken the German codes it was important to keep the Germans unaware of this. Decisions were made about which information to act on and which had to be ignored to protect the source. There's a famous event that occurred during the Battle of Britain, in 1940, when the Germans launched a surprise night attack on Coventry. Engima (in reality broken then although the movie would have us believe it wasn't broken for several more years) warned of the attack, Churchill is supposed to have ordered the attack not be intercepted to protect the secret of the Enigma decrypts. But the point is no one at Bletchley Park, including Turing, was involved in such decisions, they just provided the decrypts.
All of which makes the next scene in the movie where Turing explains to MI6 what to do and how to keep the secret of Enigma entirely fictional.
The war section of the movie ends there. The final section of the movie deals with the event in the 1950's which led to Turing being forced to take hormone therapy. In the movie he's shown as having been burgled and the police becoming suspicious and although their investigating Turing as a suspected Russian spy they uncover his homosexuality and arrest him for that.
The reality was very different, Turing was indeed burgled as shown in the movie by a man he'd picked up and paid for homosexual sex. However when Turing went to the police about the burglary he was immediately honest about how he'd met the man and how he'd obtained access to Turing's apartment. The police considered the burglary to be difficult to solve and weren't that bothered by a man stealing from homosexuals, they did however immediately arrest Turing as a self confessed homosexual.
This makes the entire set of scenes related to their investigation pure fiction.
The movie ends with some text on screen giving some details as to what happened later. In one piece they say the secret of the British having broken enigma was kept for 50 years. Again this is just a meaningless lie, the actual secret came out in 1974 (less than 30 years after the war ended) when Winterbotham publish his book The Ultra Secret which was all about how Enigma had been broken and used.
When I watch a movie apparently based on an historical event I expect some artistic license, but in general I also expect the movie to in general stick to the events. IMHO this is one of the worst war movies ever made for its appalling treatment of the facts.