Imitation game biography

The Oscar-buzzed new movie The Imitation Game is an old-fashioned biopic, crafting a tidy, entertaining narrative from disparate strands of its subject’s life—in this case, British mathematician, codebreaker, and computer pioneer Alan Turing.

Slate movie critic Dana Stevens has taken issue with the film’s emotional straightforwardness, writing, “The Imitation Game doesn’t do right by the complex and often unlovable man it purports to be about.” Meanwhile, on Outward, my colleagues J.

Bryan Lowder and June Thomas praise the film’s message in spite of its historical inaccuracies.

Just how inaccurate are those inaccuracies? I read the masterful biography that the screenplay is based on, Andrew Hodges’ Alan Turing: The Enigma, to find out.

I discovered that The Imitation Game takes major liberties with its source material, injecting conflict where none existed, inventing entirely fictional characters, rearranging the chronology of ev