A first look at Benedict Cumberbatch in 'The Imitation Game'.
THE IMITATION GAME with Benedict Cumberbatch staring as Alan Turing, the genius British mathematician, logician, cryptologist and computer scientist who led the charge to crack the German Enigma Code that helped the Allies win WWII, is set to hit theaters in both the US and the UK this November. Following WWII, Turing went on to assist with the development of computers at the University of Manchester after the war, but was prosecuted by the UK government in 1952 for homosexual acts which the country deemed illegal at the time.
The film, which also stars Keira Knightley as Joan Clarke, the English cryptanalyst who also worked as a code-breaker at Bletchley Park during World War II, takes a close-up look at the race against time by Turing and his team of code-breakers at Britain’s top-secret Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) known as Bletchley Park, during the darkest days of World War II. The ‘team of code-breakers’ were comprised of a motley group of scholars, mathematicians, linguists, chess champions and intelligence officers with a powerful ally in Prime Minister Winston Churchill. It was Churchill who authorized the provision of any resource they required.
The film spans the key periods of Turing’s life: his unhappy teenage years at boarding school; the triumph of his secret wartime work on the revolutionary electro-mechanical bombe that was capable of breaking 3,000 Enigma-generated naval codes a day; and the tragedy of his post-war decline following his conviction for gross indecency, a now-outdated criminal offence stemming from his admission of maintaining a homosexual relationship.
In 2009, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for “the appalling way he was treated” and, on 24 December, 2013, The Queen granted him a posthumous pardon.
