Brief Synopsis: During World War II, English mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing is recruited by the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS)  to work at Bletchley Park. There, he leads a team of cryptologists working around the clock to decipher Germany’s Enigma machine, which the Nazis use to send messages. But for the shy, introverted Turing, the harder mission might be getting along with his team members…and keeping his own secret hidden: he’s a homosexual at a time when it’s illegal. Turing is surrounded by codebreakers and government agents — he’s going to need friends if he’s going to get through the war.

My thought process in creating this category was to honor movies that seek out stories from real life. As the old saying goes, “the truth is stranger than fiction,” and I wanted an award for movies that find an amazing premise based on real people, and not necessarily how well they executed that onscreen. There are many people with fascinating stories to tell or people who have not received the recognition for their accomplishments that they deserve, and movies are one way to bring these stories to light. In the instance of The Imitation Game, it was a chance to bring forward an important historical figure who has been largely forgotten in the public’s eye. 

The original premise, the true story that The Imitation Game focuses on, is how Turing led Hut 8, the cryptology team that decoded the Nazi’s Engima machine during World War II. The film takes a lot of liberties with the timeline and who played what role during his time at Bletchley Park, but in real life, Turing and Gordon Welchman invented a machine called the “bombe” — the next generation of a machine invented by Polish mathematicians. I’m not a mathematician so I’m not even going to try and explain how the machine works, but essentially, the bombe reduced the number of patterns it needed to cycle through to decrypt the Nazi’s messages. Because Germany reset the Enigma machine on a daily basis, British Intelligence needed a machine that could run through every possible pattern within a single day to read the secret messages. They had machines at the time, but none were fast enough to do what was needed. Turing’s main contribution was to invent that machine — the “bombe.” 

But Turing’s life is vastly more complicated than one major accomplishment. He was a closeted homosexual for many years and paid dearly for it following World War II. He was arrested and charged with “gross indecency” in 1952, and given the choice between imprisonment or chemical castration — a hormonal treatment meant to “fix” his homosexual libido — he chose the latter. It wasn’t until August 2014 (following four years of political back-and-forth in parliament) that Turing was officially pardoned for the British government’s persecution of Alan Turing. 

I know I’ve oversimplifying Alan Turing here, but those two aspects of his life — his work with Bletchley Park and his homosexuality — were the two main sources that The Imitation Game decided to dramatize. And what I find most intriguing about Alan Turing’s life is that it was full of intensity and high stakes, but also deep sadness. it’s about telling the story of a British Intelligence war hero, and showcasing his contributions to ending World War II (some statistics have estimated the invention of Turing’s bombe shortened the war by over two years, saving over 10 million lives), while simultaneously exploring how that same British Intelligence ended up destroying Turing’s reputation because of his sexuality.