Edgar Cochran ✝️’s review published on Letterboxd:
Patriotic minimization of a more complex character, emotionally and intellectually. I can only give accolades to Cumberbatch’s good performance within the screenplay limitations of the real-life persona, and to Knightley’s always charming presence, whose popular hatred is a phenomenon that keeps eluding my understanding. The moral implications of cracking the code of the German Enigma open huge debates, from Kant’s categorical imperative to the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, but the film never goes to those territories, or to the oppressed “minorities” regarding sexual orientation. It is a sentimental and superficial biopic that never fully explores Turing’s philosophies and personal demons, and cracking the code is like the “exciting part” of the story, which is disturbing.
It is like The Theory of Everything all over again, with the exception that the latter is worse because it gets everything wrong, starting with who the protagonist should be, and entirely dismissing her Christianity. At least here we have a more compelling leading performance, but the Academy keeps astonishing me with the immaculate ability they have to award the worst possible option.
However, as a period piece, it does a decent work. Rather than having bad intentions like the aforementioned film, it’s a naïve feature that aims at giving a name to those that went unnoticed for a long time. Popularity, praise, or the seemingly better good? We do get that debate, even if briefly, which is the thematic core at hand, so that is what makes the rather superficial journey worth it without resorting to exploitative sensationalisms of the Second World War for the nth time.
61/100
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