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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.
I saw the movie. Don't tell me what to think it means, clowns.
Sort of. The Allies probably would have won anyway due to a preponderance of economic strength. However, the impact of the code-breaking was truly profound and it's hard to overstate its importance. The US naval war in the Pacific -- in particular the Battle of Midway -- was an especially stark illustration of the advantage that intel brings. The Allies located the Japanese fleet and got their planes in the air first and essentially crippled the Japanese navy for the duration of the war. Information brings tremendous power in warfare.
It's been estimated that Turing's work saved about 2 million lives. Anyone else have a greater claim to fame?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." - Mark Twain.
Telling such a complex story in 90 minutes is not trivial. All dramatizations require fictional mechanisms that leave certain things out and include other things. I will bet that even those wikipedia entries you describe are incomplete, self-serving, and miss the truth by varying degrees. It's OK. Stories are how we pass along meaning. An exact 1:1 match with reality is not desirable, nor does it make it more likely that the viewer will come away with understanding. And devotion to the precise truth will definitely not make for indelible absorption of meaning.
If someone saw The Imitation Game and learned of Turing and then went on to maybe read a book or look him up online, then it's done its job. People who are not curious enough to do that will probably not be harmed by being told a good story.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Turing was gay and he was on of the few British that actually did anything in the early computer field. That's why we hear about him, not because of his accomplishments, which were few and unimportant.
If his accomplishments were so unimportant, then why is the preeminent award in computing named for him? And why are his papers used as the foundation for much of Computer Science?
And if you think the British were little active in the early days of computing, I suggest you go and study your history better.
Your loaded use of "Gay agenda", aside, you're actually right. The writer of this movie sees it as a much needed apology to a brilliant man (are you denying that?) who made an enormous contribution to the war effort (are you denying that?) that happend to contain the seeds of the computer revolution we now all take for granted (are you denying that?). And after all that was persecuted by his government and essentially driven to suicide. Apologies are probably in order, no?
So what's the Gay agenda here - not to torture people for who they are?
The original article bemoans the way technology is (or is not) presented in the film. And it has a point - but it's beside the point. Yes, this film was made to teach us some history (more accurate, one might argue, than the history in "American Sniper"), but mostly to elevate a man who deeply deserves to be known and appreciated. And there was some interesting history in there anyway - about the weak link in the German messages that allowed the code to be broken, and about the way the army sometimes held back on what it had intercepted (at the cost of lives) in order to keep secret what they knew. It just wasn't history of technology. Sorry - different film.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...