How The Imitation Game is a terrible, awful, really stinkingly bad movie and why it’s a perfect example of why I loathe h-wording and i-wording films

I really wanted to like The Imitation Game. I mean, what could be more engrossing than a film about genius Alan Turing breaking the Nazis’ Enigma code while being just a few years away from tragic destruction? Starring Benedict Cumberbatch. Seriously. What could be better?

I finally got to watch this movie on DVD recently and I’ll tell you what could be better: Being dipped upside down in alternating vats of tar and maple syrup.

I’ll put the rest behind the “more” link to spare those who don’t like long, frothing anti-movie rants. Or who want to avoid spoilers.

A lot of people apparently found TIG as wonderful as its premise. It’s at 89% on Rotten Tomatoes. It got Oscar nominations. Cumberbatch’s performance is mesmerizing.

But the problem starts right there. Cumberbatch isn’t playing Alan Turing. He’s playing his TV Sherlock character. Which he does brilliantly. But the rude, autistic, humorless Sherlock-Turing bears zero relationship to Alan Turing, who by all accounts was shy and awkward but a likeable guy with a terrific sense of humor.

Though Non-Turing dominates the movie, he’s far from the worst problem.

The entire movie bears only the most glancing resemblance to the historic people and events. Everything else — everything — is not only made up but is made up to be more Hollywood-familiar. Turing single-handedly captures a spy! Turing single-handedly makes life-or-death military decisions! Decisions that break his own team members’ hearts! Turing single-handedly and against the opposition of everybody else at Bletchley Park conceives and builds the machine that breaks the code! And awwwww … he names it Christopher after his first schoolboy love. Etc. so on.

But that’s still not the worst.

The movie depicts people in management being hostile to Turing just because he’s an eccentric genius. Everybody else at Bletchley is straight-down-the-line normal, without quirks. But when you’re assembling a team of the top cryptographers and math theoreticians in the country, eccentrics are your stock in trade. Some on the team might indeed by perfectly socially normal. More might merely be quiet obsessives. But a goodly share are likely to be guys who forget to put their pants on in the morning or who practice vivisection on live canaries as a hobby. As a manager of geniuses, you specialize in eccentrics. Even Benedict-Sherlock-Turing wouldn’t rattle your cage. You certainly wouldn’t deliberately undermine the most brilliant man on your team because he was an oddball.

But even this dumb Hollywood premise is still not the worst part.

The worst is that The Imitation Game blatantly insults the intelligence of its audience and insults the memory of the very people it pretends to honor.

As I hinted above, this movie wants us to believe that Bletchley Park’s team of brilliant mathematicians intended to try to work out the Enigma problem with paper, pencil, chalk, and chalkboard — even though they acknowledge it would take them 20 million years. They get all huffy with Sherlock-Turing when he insists on going off by himself and building this elaborate machine that sprang full-grown out of his brain. They consider him to be wasting time and slowing the rest of them down (though how the absence of one guy could significantly slow a 20-million-year project is a bit of a mystery). Then they’re simply astounded!!!!! when the machine — dear, dear Christopher! — cracks the code.

Eventually the credits begin to roll and the filmmakers inform us that this thing that Turing created alllllll by himself is what we now know as a computer. Golly.

How could anyone over the age of 10 buy such pap?

Charles Babbage had conceived and publicized the idea of a math machine 100 years earlier, something everyone at Bletchley surely knew. Lord Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace wrote the first algorithm for it in the 19th century.

Quite aside from Babbage’s unfinished project, the machine that Turing and the team used to crack the Enigma code already existed. Turing played a part in its development, but it originated in Poland and many people had a hand in refining it. And “Christopher”? Gimme a break. It was always referred to as “the bombe.”

Oh, but Claire (someone is saying), you must allow for artistic license! Isn’t it more dramatic to have Alan Turing building a magical machine with his right hand, fending off critics with his left, and catching spies on the tip of his tongue while memorializing his lost love?

No. It’s just easier. It takes integrity and talent to begin with the real events and say, “How can we put this on the screen in a way that grabs people?” It takes very little to reach into your Hollywood bag of tricks and say, “Oh, yeah, let’s have him catch a spy!” Or worse yet, to say, “Hey, how many ‘inspiring’ cliches give us the best chance at buffaloing the Oscar voters?”

Turing was an important man who labored at unheralded work and died tragically. He played a vital role in the development of modern technology. He gave his name to a test for artificial intelligence. He deserves to have his real story told. It gives me the shudders that millions might imagine this load of codswallop is the real story.

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But it’s sooooo inspiring.

Excuse me while I go retch.

I’m not at all opposed to filmmakers altering stories, whether the source material is historic or fictional. The Hunger Games movies, for instance, have huge changes from the books and they’re better because of it. Movies are their own artform and have to be true to that fact even when it means gouging a real-life source. But that imposes an obligation to wisely determine what gets gouged and what stays intact.

For some reason, a large number of movies intended to be heartwarming or inspiring are based on real people and real events. Which means their source material is complex and rarely black & white.

So almost invariably the makers of such movies simply … well, lie. For the sake of mere convenience. And they do it badly. They discard truths wholesale and substitute Hollywood cliches because it’s the easy way out. That’s when their work becomes obscenely h-wording and i-wording.

I’ve never understood how anyone can be inspired (or heartwarmed) by a lie — particularly a lie about a real person. If your character actually did X and you say he did Y, then you’re admitting you don’t believe your character’s actual deeds are noteworthy. If you have to BS people about your protagonist’s virtues, you’re saying his actual virtues didn’t exist.

If you have to make your supposed real-life character walk on water, then you’re saying real people just ain’t ever good enough.

I’m saying if you were a good enough writer or filmmaker you’d be able to take the genuine extraordinary deeds of real human beings and make them live onscreen.

Now that would be inspiring! But to assume that nothing real can be inspiring … that’s downright depressing.

In the case of The Imitation Game, the sin is worse because faux-Turing is so absurdly elevated at the expense of other team members — who all look like a bunch of incompetent, small-minded fools.

How, OMG, how possibly can it be “inspiring” to insult the intelligence of so many amazing people? Characters and audience members both.

Yet so it is in movie after movie after movie. I just expected and hoped better of this one because its subject matter is — or was before Hollywood got its hands on it — so intelligent.

And that somehow makes it so much worse than your standard i-wording, h-wording flick about a 5’2″ Down Syndrome guy who becomes a college basketball player through sheer pluck and stick-to-itiveness or a blind three-legged dog that miraculously finds its way home across deserts and jungles while being stalked by a relentless mountain lion and several carloads of dognappers.