I took a few computer science classes in my undergrad days, and one of the heroes of the field was Alan Turing. Decades before any computer existed which might pass, he invented the “Turing Test” to determine if a computer had achieved artificial intelligence. A human judge carries on text-only dialogues with two others, one a human and one a computer. If the judge fails to correctly identify which is which, that means that the computer is intelligent. Turing called his test the Imitation Game.
The new film which borrows this name centers not on artificial intelligence but on two other aspects of Turing’s remarkable life. During World War II, Turing was one of the British code-breakers at Bletchley Park who solved the German Enigma code. As such, as much as anyone in England other than Winston Churchill, he could claim to have won the war. He was also gay, which was illegal throughout his life. Despite his accomplishments, he died in disgrace, committing suicide while receiving torturous, inhumane hormonal “treatments.”
The Imitation Game mostly concerns itself with the war story. The Germans’ Enigma machine has trillions of possible keys, and it changes every day, so standard, human-powered cryptography has no chance against it. Turing joins the code-breaking team and immediately sees the futility of their work. He begins building a proto-computer to solve the puzzle. It’s an expensive project that no one else understands — he’s like Noah building the ark. But, of course, the team eventually sees that his is the only way with any hope of success. At the last minute, he makes the breakthrough which breaks the code.
Interestingly, the drama turns at that point. They’ve accomplished their task, but Turing realizes that they must hide the achievement. Turing sees the choice between saving a few thousand people or winning the war; in the key scene of the film, he has to convince the team to sacrifice a few for the greater good of saving many. Ultimately, they devise a cold calculus to save the maximum number of people without revealing their secret. Here is one resonance of the title: Turing’s Imitation Game is about computers imitating humans, but he had to imitate a compassion-less computer to win the war.
Both parts of The Imitation Game are quite satisfying. The search for the key to Enigma is a nice story of unconventional genius and team-building through adversity, and then the necessity of maintaining the secret effectively turns it into a Sophie’s Choice tragedy. As a film, it feels stagey, with many long conversations in small rooms; the most cinematic passages are montages showing us the war happening elsewhere, to remind us of the stakes of what the Bletchley Park team works on.
Benedict Cumberbatch plays Turing, which feels a bit too on-the-nose to me. He’s very good, but the role is just a darker, more dramatic version of his “Sherlock Holmes.” In fact, these characters play off or each other in an interesting way. For much of the film, the cryptographer is like the detective, trying to uncover the enemy’s secret. But then, Turing has to turn his talents to hiding the truth rather than revealing it.
This points to the other resonance of The Imitation Game‘s title. As a test for intelligence, the Turing Test is remarkably cynical. If the computer can lie well enough to throw off the judge, it wins. To be human is to hide one’s identity, according to the test. The Imitation Game shows us why Turing came to such a cynical view of humanity. Since he was a gay man in a time and place where that made him a criminal, and since he couldn’t reveal his greatest accomplishment and thus allowed thousands to die, hiding one’s identity was at the core of Turing’s human experience.
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