London Film Festival gets off to a rousing start with The Imitation Game, a well executed historical biopic about the life of Alan Turing that plays it safe but still delivers stellar results.
Turing, here portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch, is widely considered the godfather of computer science and the film charts his years during World War II when the mathematician was hired to break the Nazis’ Enigma code.
Cumberbatch is nothing short of spectacular. Oscar nominations are sure to follow both for him and the film. Here are five reasons why.
1. Benedict Cumberbatch is great
Benedict Cumberbatch became a household name after playing a brilliant but troubled and socially inept genius in Sherlock. In The Imitation Game, he plays a brilliant but troubled and socially inept genius. Yes, it’s safe to say he’s got this role nailed.
The actor is fiercely committed to the part of Turing, rumoured to suffer from Asperger’s, who was as arrogant as he was frighteningly intelligent, an outsider not only because he was two steps ahead of everyone else but because he was secretly gay.
It’s a role that could easily have come off as cold and unlikable but, in his hands, he’s sympathetic even sweetly gauche at times and ultimately heartbreakingly tragic.
2. The drama is engrossing
The espionage thriller is well paced with solid direction by Headhunters’ Morten Tyldum, zipping along efficiently as Turing invents a machine to crack the unbreakable code.
But this is nothing compared to the task of trying to figure out how to get his colleagues to like him as the subtleties of normal human interaction are indecipherable to him, leading to some nicely comic scenes.
3. Keira Knightley’s pretty good too
Atonement proved that she’s at her best when breaking out those cut glass vowels in a wartime drama and as Joan, Turing’s crossword-loving colleague and the woman he ends up proposing marriage to, she’s better than she has been for a while; warm and playful.
There’s strong support too from Matthew Goode as a womanising cryptographer, Mark Strong as MI6 head Stewart Menzies and Charles Dance as Commander Alastair Denniston. In fact, all three should come with some kind of Best of British quality assurance label.
4. But it’s not too controversial
It’s an old-fashioned drama, which never strays far from its melodramatic comfort zone. Too prim and proper to really delve into Turing’s homosexuality, it brushes past his personal life and rushes straight to his prosecution for ‘gross indecency’ in 1952 after he was caught with a 19-year-old man.
Instead it relies on its Disney-esque mantra ‘sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of that do the things no one can imagine’ to get its message of injustice across loud and clear.
5. It’s going to get nominations for sure
It’s A Beautiful Mind mixed with The King’s Speech and a good dose of The Social Network to round it off. A formula that Academy Award voters, who like their films serious but not too contentious, might find hard to resist.
The Imitation Game opens the 58th BFI London Film Festival in partnership with American Express. See video below:
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