Enigma (2001)
2014's
The Imitation Game tried to pay movie tribute to Bletchley Park codebreaker Alan Turing, but grossly distorted his personality, greatly exaggerated his importance*, made him look like an idiot** and a possible murderer***, and literally
portrayed him committing treason. The 2001 film
Enigma, on the other hand, doesn't reference Turing at all (apparently the source novel mentions that by the time the story is set, in '43, he was on his real-life trip to America), and kinda conflates its fictional straight protagonist with the real-life figure. Obviously, then, neither of these films do Turing justice, but in sheer overall historical terms, despite being a fictional thriller, I think
Enigma gives a much better and more complex picture of Bletchley Park operations, and has a far greater respect for its audience overall. (If you don't know what the
Katyn Massacre was, chances are you'll get fairly confused.)
In artistic terms, however, it's no contest at all. Wheras
The Imitation Game has an putrid script written by some American jackass, with a corresponding gaping void of British flavor (in spite of the laughable excess of Union Jacks draped all over the place),
Enigma was adapted from a Robert Harris novel by Sir Tom Stoppard. Dougray Scott and Kate Winslet give great performances, as does Jeremy Northam (in a role he virtually reprised for
Glorious 39), and whose part seems to have inspired that of Mark Strong in
TIG. Indeed,
Enigma also has a sequence revolving around the German code and an imperiled convoy, but while I'm no Bletchley historian, the details seem plausible, and there's certainly none of the obvious idiocy or insubordination of the later movie. Taken solely on its own terms as a historical Hitchockian thriller, it's a cracking good yarn, with some first-rate craft on both sides of the camera. (If Michael Apted made a better spy-themed movie, I don't know of it, and the guy directed
The World is Not Enough.)
Conclusion: If one wants to learn about Turing, one should read a biography of the man. If one wants to watch a good film that honors the Bletchley Park cryptographers,
Enigma blows
The Imitation Game out of the freaking water on artistic and even historical grounds. (Did I mention its great John Barry score?) My thanks go out to one of the oddest producing teams I've ever heard of:
SNL's Lorne Michaels and Mick Jagger!
A-
* Yes, Turing made vital contributions, but he wasn't the singular mastermind of the whole project the movie implies.
**This is in reference to the scene where Turing realizes the Enigma code can be cracked in
one evening simply by finding a German message's "Heil Hitler", and solving the rest of the alphabet from there. Obviously, the real-life codebreaking wasn't
anywhere near that simple - no, it wasn't a matter of
simply re-arranging the alphabet once-and-you're-done, but even if it
had been, he (and everyone around him) would have had to have been a
thundering moron not to realize that far earlier!
*** This is in reference to the scene in which he and his team crack the German code, realize a British convoy is at risk, and immediately decide not to notify anyone because doing so, and saving those lives, would alert the enemy to their success. Hey, assholes, what's the point of breaking a code if you don't use it? We then get a preposterous and completely ahistorical scene in which Turing explains to an Intelligence official that he can secretly calculate for
his eyes only how often the code's intelligence can safely be used so as to not tip off the Germans - in other words, he himself says the point of cracking the code is to use it more than once, when he just a few days before unilaterally decided that he'd decide when that one time would be, without even informing his superiors. What
slanderous, horrible f******* bull****!