This was Norwegian director Morten Tyldum's first English feature, and he certainly did a styling job! This is easily one of the best films I've seen, mainly thanks to Benedict Cumberbatch's amazing portrayal of our hero, Alan Turning. Fascinating, intriguing and compelling, this was a thrill to watch! Benedict is just SO GOOD! Based on a true story, I was even more captivated.

Brilliant soundtrack, well edited, well written, well acted, and good pacing to maintain a good level of emotional engagement. Its very watchable and exciting. But there's something deeply frustrating about the decisions behind the screenplay. It clearly focuses on Turing's unfair persecution for being gay - this is the tragic element that we're left with as an audience. Which is absolutely worth a story, for sure. But if that's your angle, then why did they focus on enigma/bombe and miss out so much of his contribution to modern computing? They make out he pretty much worked alone on designing/building/running the bombe (called Christopher in the film) which is just unnecessarily false. I'm still waiting on a decent film or mini-series to portray the incredible events of what happened at Bletchley during the war: it was truly a collaborative effort. Gordon Welchman has just as much input as Turing on the bombe machine, which was first invented by the Poles anyhow, and built by engineers at Letchworth. There were eventually many bombe machines - not just one that Turing seemingly built with his own hands in a hangar-sized 'hut' (the huts were a lot smaller). The whole design/point of the bombe was to exploit a flaw in the enigma, requiring a 'crib' - a known phrase like 'heil hitler' used in the film, which they could match up alongside the cypher to extract patterns. The film delivers this discovery as a eureka moment at the bar, well after Turing has built the bombe! Which makes no sense and is confusing to the viewer as to what the original intentions of the machine actually were. The film implies there was a spy in Turing's team. Really - is this kind of cinematic device really necessary to keep audiences engaged? Was the REAL story not interesting and exciting enough?! When told properly at least. There are far more angles to the story - how so many misfits/outliers were brought together to collaborate on genius ideas, with huge determination and drive. The idea that the seemingly impossible can be achieved. Its a really inspiring moment of history that should surely be pushed more in today's world. Its a great film ciematically, but its annoying how the personal agenda of the book's author and film's screenwriters biased the film away from truth towards one aspect of Turing's life, and in doing so failed to really do either angle as much justice as was deserved. It might have also been fitting to have shown how much sexual abuse happened at Sherborne school when/where Turing attended, which continued well through the 20th century according to well researched documentaries and reports, but I guess that's not quite as pleasing for sunday afternoon cinema audiences.

This is a great film. When I saw the trailer for it I was worried I would get bored at one point because this usually isn't my type of movie. But because of Benedict Cumberbatch's outstanding performance I was gripped from start to finish. I wasn't very familiar with the story of Alan Turing but I knew he cracked the Enigma and had to hide that he was gay for many years. But that was pretty much all I knew. The film enthralled me. I payed attention to every single thing that happened in this movie. And that payed off at the end. At the end of the film some text appears telling us that Alan Turing committed suicide through cyanide poisoning after undergoing Chemical Castration for 2 years. When this happens you see the team throwing their work into a fire whilst cheering and laughing. This ultimately made the film even more emotional. Through Cumberbatch's incredible performance you really see how attached he becomes to his machine "Christopher" and it was truly emotional to watch I have to recommend this too everyone interested in history or film in general

This movie shows two plot trends: one is the runnning against time to discover the secret code of the Nazi militar messages led by a group of cryptoanalysts during WWII under the direction of Alan Turing, a brilliant mathematician and the other is the latter's dramatic life and feelings as an homossexual at a time when that behaviour was a crime in Great Britain and for which he is later convicted. His success at that cryptoanalysis work is kept secret which prevents him to be recognized as a hero who has largely contributed to shorten the war time and thus saving millions of lives. Besides that he is always being harassed by his superiors to deliver quickly that code decipherment. By the way this story is based on real events. The movie shows all this in detail in a way that passionates the viewers in terms of good cinema direction and acting performance.