The Imitation Game is a 2014 period biographical thriller film directed by Morten Tyldum and written by Graham Moore, based on the 1983 biography Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges.
The film's title quotes the name of the game cryptanalyst Alan Turing proposed for answering the question "Can machines think?", in his 1950 seminal paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence". The film stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing, who decrypted German intelligence messages for the British government during World War II. Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Rory Kinnear, Charles Dance, and Mark Strong appear in supporting roles.
The Imitation Game was released theatrically in the United States on November 28, 2014. The film grossed over $233 million worldwide on a $14 million production budget, making it the highest-grossing independent film of 2014. It received eight nominations at the 87th Academy Awards, winning for Best Adapted Screenplay; five nominations at the 72nd Golden Globe Awards; and three nominations at the 21st Screen Actors Guild Awards. It also received nine BAFTA nominations, and won the People's Choice Award at the 39th Toronto International Film Festival.
Plot
In 1951, two policemen, Nock and Staehl, investigate the mathematician Alan Turing after an apparent break-in at his home. During his interrogation by Nock, Turing tells of his time working at Bletchley Park during the Second World War.
In 1928, the young Turing is unhappy and bullied at boarding school. He develops a friendship with Christopher Morcom, who sparks his interest in cryptography. Turing develops romantic feelings for him, but Christopher soon dies from tuberculosis.
When Britain declares war on Germany in 1939, Turing travels to Bletchley Park. Under the direction of Commander Alastair Denniston, he joins the cryptography team of Hugh Alexander, John Cairncross, Peter Hilton, Keith Furman, and Charles Richards. The team is trying to analyze the Enigma machine, which the Nazis use to send coded messages.
Turing is difficult to work with, and considers his colleagues inferior; he works alone to design a machine to decipher Enigma messages. After Denniston refuses to fund the construction of the machine, Turing writes to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who puts Turing in charge of the team and funds the machine. Turing fires Furman and Richards and places a difficult crossword in newspapers to find replacements. Joan Clarke, a Cambridge graduate, passes Turing's test but her parents will not allow her to work with the male cryptographers. Turing arranges for her to live and work with the female clerks who intercept the messages and shares his plans with her. With Clarke's help, Turing warms to the other colleagues, who begin to respect him.
Turing's machine, which he names Christopher, is constructed, but cannot determine the Enigma encryption settings quickly enough; the Germans reset them each day. Denniston orders it to be destroyed and Turing fired, but the other cryptographers threaten to leave if Turing goes. After Clarke plans to leave on the wishes of her parents, Turing proposes marriage, which she accepts. During their engagement party, Turing confirms his homosexuality to Cairncross, who warns him to keep it secret. After overhearing a conversation with a female clerk about messages she receives from the same German coder, Turing has an epiphany, realising he can program the machine to decode words he already knows exist in certain messages. One German coder always opens his first message with a standard plaintext German script. That reveals enough of the day's Enigma code that Christopher can quickly decode all the day's messages. After he recalibrates the machine, it quickly decodes a message and the cryptographers celebrate.
They learn a convoy is about to be attacked, but Turing realises that if they suddenly reroute the convoy and attack the U-boats, the Germans will realize Enigma is compromised and change the machinery. Therefore, the team at Bletchley Park cannot act on every decoded message and choose not to save the convoy, despite desperate pleas from Peter, whose brother is a sailor serving on one of the ships. Turing creates a statistical model to indicate which warnings to send to maximize destruction and minimize discovery.