“I think this movie tried to be two movies. It tried to be the more introspective look back at society and how we treated gay people and neurodivergent people, a very personal, individual story, and also it’s kind of a classic war movie: you put the team together, you do the thing, there’s some peril along the way, and through cleverness and grit, things get done.
And I think this movie never decided which kind of movie it wanted to be more, never cranked the volume all the way up on either story, and that left it a bit of a muddled, inoffensive middleground.
If it wanted to be the more personal look, I think we’d need a lot more time spent with Alan Turing post-war.
And there are such rich details missing. I read about Turing after watching this movie, and something left out entirely is that after his school buddy, Christopher, passed away, Turing and Christopher’s mother exchanged letters and gifts every year around Christopher’s birthday all the way up to the time of her death. I found that, and the contents of some of the letters, very touching. If they’d gone the personal route, stuff like that would’ve definitely enriched the movie.
It’s an omission that only makes sense if you’re making the big war movie.
In the big war movie, you have the assembly of the team, the little humorous bits with A WOMAN joining and Turing’s attempts to not be such an asshole, and you can do things like have a cute sham wedding and so on. But I think you have to move away from the middle school flashbacks and worry a bit less about Turing’s personal life.
We did get one scene where they have to make a very tough decision, and it feels like they resolve that in about 2 minutes. But, see, we can’t go the way of making this stuff more inflated and dramatic because this isn’t that kind of movie, exactly.
I think this kind of movie can work and be awesome, a slice of life for an individual within this much larger global conflict, but The Imitation Game just didn’t quite get there for me.”