"The Imitation Game"

On Friday, I went and saw Benedict Cumberbatch in "The Imitation Game". This movie is a conundrum: an excellent film, yet one that takes so many liberties with the historical record that it has to be considered a form of fiction. The trouble comes from trying to make the issues of the 50's (spying against the Soviets) the issues of the 40's (spying against the Germans). It's important to keep these subjects separate, not conflate them. Yet I really enjoyed the movie. Go figure!

The Wikipedia article on the movie summarizes many of these historical issues:

Suggesting that the work at Bletchley Park was ... stymied for the first few years.... (Progress was actually made from the beginning of the war in 1939...)

Naming the Enigma-breaking machine "Christopher" after Turing's childhood friend. (In actuality, this electromechanical machine was called 'Victory'.)

Showing a scene where the ... team decides not to use broken codes to stop a German raid on a convoy that the brother of one of the code breakers ... is serving on, in order to hide the fact they have broken the code. (In reality, Hilton had no such brother, and decisions about when and whether to use data from Ultra intelligence were made at much higher administrative levels.)

Exaggerating Turing's social difficulties to the point of depicting him having Asperger syndrome or otherwise being on the autism spectrum. (The actual adult Turing, who had friends, was viewed as having a sense of humour and had good working relationships with his colleagues.)

Portraying Turing's arrest as happening in 1951 and having a detective suspect him of being a Soviet spy until Turing tells his codebreaking story in an interview with the detective, who then discovers Turing is gay. (Turing's arrest was in 1952. The detective in the film and the interview as portrayed are fictional. Turing was investigated for his homosexuality after a robbery at his house and was never investigated for espionage.)

Suggesting that the chemical castration that Turing was forced to undergo made him unable to think clearly or do any work. (Despite physical weakness and changes in Turing's body including gynecomastia, at that time he was doing innovative work on mathematical biology....)

Clarke visiting Turing in his home while he is serving probation.(There is no record of Clarke ever visiting Turing's residence during his probation....)

Stating outright that Turing committed suicide after a year of hormone treatment. (In reality, the nature of Turing's death is a matter of considerable debate.)

Depicting Commander Denniston as a rigid officer, bound by military thinking and eager to shut down the decryption machine when it fails to deliver results. (Denniston's grandchildren stated that the film takes an "unwarranted sideswipe" at their grandfather's memory.... They said their grandfather had a completely different temperament from the one portrayed in the film....)

Showing Turing interacting with Stewart Menzies, head of the British Secret Intelligence Service.(There are no records showing they interacted at all during Turing's time at Bletchley Park.)

Including an espionage subplot involving Turing working with John Cairncross. (Turing and Cairncross worked in different areas of Bletchley Park and there is no evidence they ever met. Historian Von Tunzelmann was angered by this subplot ... writing that "Creative licence is one thing, but slandering a great man's reputation – while buying into the nasty 1950s prejudice that gay men automatically constituted a security risk – is quite another.")