Comment by hermitcrab
5 months ago
"Considering how the UK treated Alan Turing while he was alive, he deserved a better institute to honour his memory."
Ouch. Almost certainly nothing like the insult his memory endured from "The imitation game" film though. Everyone associated with that film should feel a bit ashamed.[1]
I'm a UK based software engineer, but I almost never heard anything about this organization. Has anything useful come out of it?
[1] I could only bear to watch the first 20 minutes. But I can't imagine it got any better.
What's wrong with The Imitation Game?
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imitation_Game#Historical_...
"GCHQ Departmental Historian Tony Comer went even further in his criticism of the film's inaccuracies, saying that "The Imitation Game [only] gets two things absolutely right. There was a Second World War and Turing's first name was Alan".
If you are making a fictional film, knock yourself out. But when you are using a real person's name, have some respect for them and their work.
Just throwing stuff at the wall here - Wikipedia has a pretty long list of historical inaccuracies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imitation_Game#Historical_...
The main complaint seem to be the minimisation of Turing's homosexuality and the focus instead on Joan Clarke. There's also a whole list of historical inaccuracies listed on Wikipedia[0], including changing the name of the Enigma breaking machine from "Victory" to "Christopher" and stating that Turning invented "The Computer".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imitation_Game#Historical_...
The worst for me is the John Cairncross subplot that implied Turing might have committed some (light) treason because of his homosexuality. From Wikipedia[1]:
> Turing and Cairncross worked in different areas of Bletchley Park and there is no evidence they ever met. Alex Von Tunzelmann was angered by this subplot (which suggests that Turing was for a while blackmailed into not revealing Cairncross as a spy lest his homosexuality be revealed), writing that "creative licence is one thing, but slandering a great man's reputation – while buying into the nasty 1950s prejudice that gay men automatically constituted a security risk – is quite another."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imitation_Game#Personaliti...
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You seem to be in the minority with that opinion..
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_imitation_game
I agree with the parent poster and a ton of people do. Anyone who actually knows the story of the breaking of Enigma and Turing in general would know that that film is terrible.
I know a great deal about both, Turing being my scientific idol. I thought The Imitation Game was great, though not nearly enough postwar events and his trauma. I realize the title The Imitation Game was meant to be a double meaning, about both Bletchley's cryptographic attempts and Turing's attempts to feign heterosexuality, but the movie ultimately was about breaking encryption, not a study of homosexual life in a bigoted nation. I wouldn't personally call it a biopic. It's a sensationalized version of actual events because the real thing would've been boring. No one wants to watch me, by analogy, sit at a whiteboard beside a computer staring at symbols for eight straight hours.
I'm sorry you didn't get the biography you wanted.
The film is alright, it's just not particularly accurate.
Wait, a ton of people? I stand corrected!
It was very bad storytelling, which is disappointing because Benedict Cumberbatch's performance was very good.
The majority of the people who watched the film probably knew very little about Turing or his work. And now they have a horribly skewed view.
The main criticisms appear to be that the film inflated Turing's contribution to the conception and development of Enigma. "Horribly skewed" seems like a bit of an overstatement.