Adapted from the book Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges
Brilliant mathematician and social misfit Alan Turing helps win WWII by developing a machine to decrypt German radio transmissions.
This is a difficult adaptation to analyze because the book is so long. If the movie had tried to include everything in the book, it would probably take an entire day to watch. The book encompasses most of Alan Turing's life; the movie mainly focuses on his work during the war, with a few scenes of him as a schoolboy and a few more when he's being investigated in 1951. Changing the focus like this was, in and of itself, a very good idea, and moving from the chronological presentation of the book to jumping around in time helped tie everything together well. But overall, the movie is almost laughably inconsistent with the book.
The movie uses Turing's arrest in 1951 for gross indecency as a framing device, showing him revealing the story of his wartime work to a police detective. While I understand why the filmmakers would have wanted to use him as a narrator, it kind of ruins the premise that he's good with secrets if we're seeing him reveal all this highly classified information. With all of the straight-washing I've noticed in these adaptations, it was tempting to be impressed that the film even bothered to address the reason he was arrested in the first place, but that didn't quite make up for all the emphasis that was placed on Turing's relationship with Joan Clarke. She is literally mentioned on fewer than 20 of the 664 pages of the book, but she's in a significant portion of the movie. Normally I'm all for expanding female roles, and I didn't necessarily object to the way the film exaggerated her contributions to the project, but when you're making a movie about an openly gay man, maybe don't focus quite so much on his very brief, failed engagement to a woman.
I don't mean to imply that all the changes were bad. The book mentions way too many people that I had a hard time keeping track of, so I thought the movie was right to combine or eliminate most of them; this made the story much easier to follow. Many events seemed far more dramatic on screen than they were described in the book, but this is fairly typical for adaptations, so I can't fault the movie for that. All in all, however, I found this to be one of the more disappointing adaptations to win this award. It's a fine movie, but it could have been so much better.
Coming up next: The Big Short, based on the book by Michael Lewis
