“The Imitation Game,” a 2015 box-office hit, will be shown at Odell Public Library, 307 S. Madison Street, Morrison, IL, on Tuesday, September 8, 2015, at 2:00 p.m., in the Program Room. This is a tense, World War II thriller about an intelligent and creative British team, who cracked Nazi Germany’s Enigma code. They believe in themselves against all odds.
“Sometimes, it is the people no one imagines anything of, who do the things that no one imagines,” became their rallying cry.
The film is also a biography of Alan Turing, the movie’s hero. He brings victory to the Allies by inventing a revolutionary machine that would give birth to the computer age. He helped save countless lives, by significantly shortening the war because of his code-breaking machine. Later, he is treated cruelly, and much of the details were kept classified for 50 years. Few knew of Turing’s wartime accomplishments.
Alan Turing a brilliant, impossibly arrogant, and a socially awkward mathematician is played by Benedict Cumberbatch, an English actor who has won fame with his role as Sherlock Holmes. Keira Knightley is his female counterpart, Joan Clarke. She is mistakenly pegged as a secretary while trying out for the code-breaking team. Clarke is as much an “odd duck” as Turing and, perhaps, is even brighter.
The film begins with a mystery in 1951, as a detective investigates a burglary at Turing’s house where nothing is taken. The plot flashes back to 1928 and the brutal bullying of Turing as a school-boy prodigy. It then shifts to 1939 at a battleground of the minds that relied on superior intellect, rather than bombs to beat the enemy.
“The Imitation Game” is a mystery, a biography, a history, and the story about a man and his great deed of which little of us know. It is a great movie, made even more gripping by the acting of Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightly.
There is no charge, however, donations are welcome.