Dear Jodie - The Imitation Game

Dear Jodie,

I LOVE Sherlock Holmes, but not the series with Benedict Cumberbatch.  Basil Rathbone will always be Holmes for me.

That being said, I thought Cumberbatch was marvelous in "The Imitation Game."  Wow! What a performance!

Alan Turing didn't have a chance, really. My father once told me, "Son, it's hard as hell to like what you can't understand." People of Turing's day couldn't understand his genius or his sexuality so they took from him what they could and made him an outcast.  What a damn shame!

Mr. Cumberbatch brought this onto the screen beautifully, I think. The best part for me was bringing his youthful love to life again in the computer that essentially wins the war for the allies. In the end, he could love only Christopher of the past and present … the boy and the machine.

And, of course, I loved his confused tears when Joan Clarke explains the enormity of his contribution.

Keira Knightly as Joan Clarke shined as I have yet to see her. Just marvelous! I loved watching her, especially toward the end when she returns the words that Turing had once said to her.

"Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine."

Many in my father's generation complained about "changing history" or "revising history."

When I studied World War II in history class up until I minored in history in college, I never heard of the Enigma code or Alan Turing.  Even then, it barely drew mention. It has only been in my lifetime that Turing's contribution to the war effort has become publicaly known, and then well known.

Not only were his accomplishments wartime secrets, but issues of homosexuality and chemical castration would have grown like weeds in the yard of a vacant house.

No, not changing history, or revising history, but shining lights onto the past to see those facts and events long lurking in the shadows and adding them into the canon or replacing inaccuracies.

Though I have never believed in watching movies to gain a history lesson, I think this one shined brightly and vividly.

8 out of 10

I'm curious to know what you think!

Read Jodie's review here.