"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.
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".
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."
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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