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The Imitation Game Fails Test of Inspiring the Next Turings
reifman writes In 'The Imitation Game': Can This Big Fat Cliche Win Best Picture?, reviewer Monica Guzman blasts the film for distorting history and missing the opportunity to inspire today's tech savvy, highly surveilled generation to follow in Turing's path: Instead of an inventor, it shows a stereotype. Instead of inspiring us to follow in the footsteps of a person who shaped technology, the film inspires us only to get out of the way of the next genius who can. The Imitation Game changed aspects of the real Alan Turing's personality to conform more closely to our idea of the solitary nerd. It falls in line with the tired idea that only outcasts could love computers...As for explaining the science behind Turing's code-breaking machine, the movie doesn't bother. if invention doesn't deserve top billing in this story, where the technology at its heart is not only historically significant but hugely resonant in our lives today, then I don't know where it would. The message of the movie is that the uncommon man can do amazing things, but the message we need is that the common man, woman, anybody can and should tinker with the technology that manages our whole world.
The "common man" resembles nothing as much as a crab bucket, each one clamoring to pull the top crabs back down into the pile.
The common man never did anything, the inventor and the creator did.
Typical review by a millenial hispanic woman.
the message we need is that the common man, woman, anybody can and should tinker with the technology that manages our whole world.
Why ? One genius can do more on his own than a thousand mediocre people together.
The movie is from start to finish is to show how gay people suffered in history, and breaking the gay stereotype of being "Fabulous". They weren't taking the nerd rights at all.
Yeah, move audiences are really chomping at the bit for a probing discussion of the Halting Problem and the Turing-Church correspondence.
It's a complicated topic, mainly because his work for GCHQ was only tangentially related to his work on universal computing machines or his theoretical mathematics, they never actually built a Turing-complete computing system to defeat Enigma (with bombes) or the Fish cipher (Colossi) -- and even this distinction between the two fundamentally different problems is lost to the film.
The movie isn't about computers, it's not even really about codebreaking. The movie is about a recluse with a dark secret, who, despite not fitting in and being generally weird, finds a purpose for himself and a way to make a contribution to the war, only to see his greatest accomplishments hidden from view and perverted by the security state. The movie is basically a retelling of A Man for All Seasons.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
when so many times, the film industry polishes up a flawed human hero in a Hollywood retelling.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
This movie is about a society needing an outsider to save it and then destroying its savior for being an outsider. All the tech and math stuff is just window dressing.
I saw the movie. Don't tell me what to think it means, clowns.
The problem with people like Turing, Einstein etc. is that nobody understands them nor the way they think (or thought). Trying to do films about them is guessing. In general, films about people this clever are crap because nobody knows what they really are.
As an aside - one thing I never read about is that not only did Turning have to crack the code, but it was all in German (and he is English) - that seems to be not recorded anywhere. So he was a not a genius, but a brilliant genius.
sounds more like "my agenda wasn't served by this picture"
every single historical film ever made, and ever will be made, will be inaccurate. because you can't distill someone's life or a major event into 2 hours and retain accuracy. which doesn't mean anything
because to pay homage to someone we admire, and to make more people aware of the great things they did, far, far outweighs the griping someone might have about accuracy
don't get me wrong: there is such a thing as propaganda and lies. but as long as a film remains broadly accurate we can forgive a foible here and there
for example: there are also people griping about the films "american sniper," and "selma." i'm not going to say if chris kyle did or said ugly things that were conveniently ignored, and i'm not going to say if lyndon johnson's attitudes were incorrectly conveyed. because it doesn't matter to my point in this post. what i'm going to say (i have to be careful because you can set off all sorts of pointless tangential arguments based on misunderstanding) that my *personal* belief is: getting someone interested in the history far outweighs these foibles
the movies were obviously made with care and concern, and were not made as ugly propaganda attack pieces, which also exist, and are what is worthy of ridicule and condemnation. the intentions of the people making "american sniper", "selma", and "the imitation game" were good, honorary to their subject matter, historically faithful if not 100% accurate, and were obviously not made with the intention of ignorant attack pieces. so they are all worthy films anyone should see, to get more people interested in these important topics, as we all should be, to learn from them
and if someone is more interested in the actual history, they can pursue the actual historical facts in academic treatises, documentaries, biographies, etc. which will never, ever be boiled down into 2 hour pop movies
i will say this: the controversies about lbj in "selma", and chris kyle in "american sniper", are far more substantial than these weak contrived complaints about "the imitation game"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It's a movie. It's message was "Give us your money".
Any message beyond that is just to get people to give their money more readily.
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The movie was great, but it was a romantic drama, if anything. Well made, but touche.
A more inspiring movie would have been one that would delve into universal computers and the underlying "code" that appears to dictate the real "computational" nature of the universe itself. All modern computers are Turing machines. But without the fundamental capacity of computation embedded within nature itself, computers would no be. Alan Turing didn't just crack the code of Enigma. He cracked the universe first. The machine he created tapped into the computational universe, just as those who split atoms tapped into the atomic universe.
1. Alen Turing was gay.
2. He was briefly engaged to his coworker lady friend.
3. He worked on Enigma.
4. He died after the war.
Besides that it was a complete fiction. "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" was more historically accurate.
If you want the truth, I suggest starting with wikipedia: "Marian Rejewski", then "Bombe", then "Bletchley Park", then "Coventry Blitz".
Sadly, the real story is way more interesting and moved much faster than the movie. The Poles gave Enigma cracking plans to the French and the Brits on July 24th 1939. The Brits started up Bletchley Park, brought in Turing and many others, and had a working Enigma cracking program (many machines) by the end of fall 1939!
Another interesting detail that many books on Enigma (and this movie very loosely alludes to) still get wrong has to do with the German upgrade to their code machine in 1942. David Kahn in his "The Codebreakers" book attributes the success in cracking Enigma after 1942 to capturing code books. The truth is that Alan Turing became the technical ambassador to the United States and came over the pond November 1942. He met with some engineers at NCR and developed an electronic version of the mechanical bombe, the plans were finished and approved by the US Navy in January 1943, and the first working prototypes that were 10000 faster than the British bombs were working by May. The rest of that story is at wikipedia: "United States Naval Computing Machine Laboratory".
These are the stories I want to see, not the I'm-the-misunderstood-genius-Asperger-syndrome Turning bullshit that "Imitation Game" put out there.
- Minarke
says it all
People in general are scumbag assholes. And if you are smart and save your entire country, the assholes will beat you down anyways.
Ask Neil Degrasse Tyson how much hate mail he gets from the idiot assholes of the world. Just look at the man's twitter feed.
If you are smart, the raging morons of the world will hate you. This is a stone cold fact.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Today's tech-savvy, highly surveilled generation got the lesson long ago: the lesson is "don't make waves". Keep a low profile, stay out of trouble, do not get noticed. In mediocrity and conformity lie safety and tranquillity.
People interested in the history of WWII, code breaking and Turing should probably read Bodyguard of Lies. It's a 1970s publication which deals with the "secret war" between England and Germany during the Second World War. It dives into the drama concerning the Enigma machine, how the British came into its secrets and how it was exploited. There is a lot more in the book and it covers the span of the war, but a good deal of the code breaking is covered.
Sounds like they got Cumberbatch for his performance in Sherlock and wrote the script so he could be the same obsessive antisocial character, just with a different name.
I wonder if the script would've been radically different if they found a different actor to play Turing.
In your rush to avoid the shift key, you have forgotten something critical: you speak only for you. Not for "we."
The technology in the movie more reminded me of metropolis where the guy is having to needlessly move all the levers. This was a movie mostly about relationships and how it sucked to be gay in mid century England.
It also taught me that if you give an apple to some engineers they will put their careers on the line and entirely stop opposing your ideas that they had previously vehemently opposed.
Maybe the only true to life lesson is that if your government owes you a favour that you can't collect.
The Imitation Game has been out almost six months and there are no new Turings yet! It has clearly failed to inspire the next Turing.
Also, the magic green beans I planted yesterday still haven't grown, so I'm gonna chalk that up as a failure, too. The subzero temperatures should not matter.
Has the internet made everyone stupid, or just headline writers?
You are welcome on my lawn.
During my 23 years as a programming engineer, I've noticed that a lot of the people with the same job just aren't good at it. They tend to be nerdy. My speculative theory is that social dropouts are drawn towards computers, because a computer offers a very simple social interaction - whether it be with people connected through the network, or with a computer itself. I'd estimate that 80-90% of the people who claim software engineer as their profession, actually suck at it and chose it because there's nowhere else in the corporate world for them to fit. The other 10-20%, like myself are normal people with normal social desires and a slew of hobbies. I've always gotten along better with the sales guys than the other programmers. I like to golf, drink beer and eat steaks. It's pretty simple, really.
"If you are smart, the raging morons of the world will hate you. This is a stone cold fact."
Except that it's not.
Alan Turing was very much liked by everyone that knew him. This movie and your stereotype got it wrong.
I suppose simple people would like the world to be simple. Too bad reality doesn't work that way.
Go watch "The Dam Busters" a great film that gives a detailed account of how an individual inventor started with skipping rocks on in a test tank to and got to the deployment of a new kind of bomb which reeked havoc on the dams of the Reich.
Like all films, it condenses and simplifies, but it makes an effort to explain the science and show the unexpected and tortured path to success. The inventor has an uphill battle against the establishment, but he makes his case, and once the ball gets rolling (no pun intended) the bomber pilots also have their part in developing the complete weapons system.
"The WInd Rises", a film who's hero is a pioneering aeronautical engineer, could have had focused more on the technical challenges and triumphs of aircraft design. Every airplane, especially the Zero fighter, has a great story to tell, but Miyazaki held back out of a fear of alienating the perceived wider audience.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Its entertainment. I enjoyed it a lot, and I think others have too.
In which case, the better biopic would be Theory of Everything about Stephen Hawking, who arguably suffered much more than Turing. There's simply no contest between psychological torture and the sheer physical torture of being paralysed from the nose down. And Hawking was "helped" by lots of people besides his wife and the few physicists who shared his passion for seeking to understand the universe as it is. If Turing made the conscious decision to end his life, Hawking made the equally strong decision to survive despite the two years lease of life that doctors had given me.
I, too, hate it when a film does not inspire.
The story of a man of vast intellect and education who is a virtuoso at his craft (also maligned and misunderstood by almost everyone) filmed carefully so as to make not only his massive intellect apparent, but also managing to paint him as warm and charming within his personal limits.
And yet, for all the success of the film, we just don't have as many Hannibal Lectors as you'd think...
Did the movie (I haven't seen it) even hint at the incessant persecution Turing suffered at the hands of the Establishment especially through his peers and superiors because of his sexuality? That would have been a MAJOR part of his life even if he was chemically castrated. Or was it like I see so many times in bopics which touch on such seemingly insignificant but fundamentally essential facets of personalities with a cattle poke and three seconds of screen time?
Yes, Turing was a genius. That should be enough to inspire anybody. If this film didn't deal with his battle to fit in with a society that didn't fucking want him in it but were perfectly at ease in exploiting him, then it was a waste of time.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
the only thing Turing did was to accelerate the decryption process by multiplying the computing power. He did that using the Polish machine called the bomba kryptograficzna
The Agenda was not to inspire a new generation of programmers but to push a Gay agenda.
Enigma was broken by a Polish group led by Marian Rejewski and the results handed
over to the British. Turing built the Bomb to mechanize the process.. Rejewski's story is much
more interesting than Turing's and would make a better movie.
Sniper is full of the later, starting with the suggestion that Kyle was in Iraq was 911, which was well-debunked a decade ago. Then suggesting that if Kyle was wrong to shoot someone, he'd end up in military prison - a farce as the U.S. made the puppet government it set up agree to give American's immunity from war crimes. But even the puppets got fed up and refused to let the U.S. go on shooting Iraqis for shits and giggles without consequence. Then there's the rationalization of murdering a woman and a boy because they were going to throw a grenade at the hostile, torturing, shoot-first-ask-questions-never army occupying their country. To use the movie's own metaphor, American forces were the wolves, and the "insurgents" were the sheepdogs trying to drive out the invaders who came on false pretenses.
Zero Dark 30 was a similar POS, for making the equally debunked claim that torture led to the successful assassination of Bin Laddin. On the other side of the coin, Selma might have won best picture if it hadn't relied on it's own historical revisionism, when it made out LBJ as being an opponent of civil rights that had to be won over into an ally. A lie, and a lazy one at that - if they wanted to throw rocks at LBJ, all they had to do was bring up Vietnam, another aggressive war of choice that MLK adamantly opposed. Which disproportionately affected black men, as they were far less likely to have the means to dodge the draft by going to college, or flee it entirely by going to Canada or Mexico.
The movie was titled ":The Imitation Game", and is a feature film, with a script adapted by a person of same persuasion as Turing.
As with all feature films, that are not called flat out documentaries or biographies, there tends to be historical inaccuracies, fro dramatic effect.
It was not funded by North Korea with the title. " A Patrotic Biography that shall be used as propaganda to inspire more young patriots to become computer scientists in the service of the great leader, and which also would be pleasing to certain film critics"
No wonder critics are considered the scum of earth.,
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
What possible future genius would need a movie to get inspired and find his true calling?
That is utter bs, i don't think a thousand movies will/can do that.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Yeah, they loved him and held him up high.
The British government even held parades for him right after the war...
Oh wait, they didn't in fact they tried to imprison him.
Wierd how history is completely different than your made up "facts" You should tell the world that you are the export and they need to change history to match your musings.
Don't fear a government or world body taking over our world. Mediocrastan already rules our world. Kurt Vonnegut had it down beyond The Report from Iron Mountain. One of the new enemies of governments and corporations and by proxy YOU is anything beyond average. It is the year 2081 (2015). Because of Amendments 211, 212, and 213 to the Constitution, every American is fully equal, meaning that no one is stupider, uglier, weaker, or slower than anyone else. The Handicapper General and a team of agents ensure that the laws of equality are enforced. Thanks to this Monoculture message, processed goop is now Real Food,iTunes represents amazing Real sound and so on. Or rather and so it goes.
.. who will tell you that they are worth 100 "common man".
Yes this review is stupid but not because of this. This isn't a movie about computer science, nerds or mathematics. It's a movie about acceptance (or lack thereof) and imposture. It's the story of a secretive and weird guy, at odds with what society would tolerate, who finds a way to be of incredible service to his country, in the lowest profile kind of way, and is afterwards betrayed and ostracized by his fellow citizens (your beloved "common" men)
I didn't love the movie, because I was dissapointed by the lack of science. I'd have loved a movie focusing on his work, but let's face it : this is not the subject for a mainstream movie, this is the subject for a 10k hit video on youtube. That makes you sad ? well... imagine how the guy waiting for an actual precomlumbian historical movie feels like. You cannot ask hollywood to produce something they don't understand.
Some inventors are/were genuises. Many are/were just plodders.
Many inventions and new devices (many things are mislabeled inventions when they are really just engineering applied to known interactions between materials.) are created by teams or even (horrors!) committees.
Designers are almost all overwhelmingly average. To a great extent it is why they are designers rather than artists, inventors or even craftsmen.
Design is mostly the residue of luck.
There are software programs that can create music in the style of any composer and fool experts.
It's mostly just pattern matching with a bit of randomness thrown in.
No one complains that the latest Liam Neeson action adventure movie doesn't inspire us. I haven't read any complaints about The Best Of Me because it wasn't inspiring enough. So why does this burden fall upon The Imitation Game? It shouldn't and it only does in the mind of the author. If it were meant to inspire, it would have been a full blown documentary and not distorted an already remarkable life with cinematic and storytelling techniques to make it seem even more remarkable. This movie is entertainment. It is meant to entertain the audience. If they walk away with a little more knowledge about Turing or WW2, that's just icing on the cake.
It sounds to me like the author of the article studded Turing's work prior to seeing the movie, had some preconceptions as to what she wanted to experience in the theater, and was left unimpressed. Now she is publicly blogging her discrepancies because she believes her vision for how Turing's work should be presented to an audience seeking entertainment is more relevant than that of a director whose vision was Oscar nominated.
"The message of the movie is that the uncommon man can do amazing things, but the message we need is that the common man, woman, anybody can and should tinker with the technology that manages our whole world." We could debate whether we need that message, but I don't see how you could get it from Turing's life without destroying the truth. He was an uncommon man, and he did amazing things. And he was not a tinkerer.