The Imitation Game

At its heart is The Imitation Game a very powerful film about a man who gave everything to his country and a country that took everything from one man. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Alan Turing, a genius mathematician and cryptanalyst who leads a team in a race against time to decode a captured Enigma machine at the top secret base at Bletchley Park. His team which includes Keira Knightley playing Joan Clarke, Mathew Goode as Huge Alexander, Mathew beard as Peter Hilton and Allen Leech as John Cairncross and they are responsible for the Allies wining the Second World War and can be best described as ‘The Tweed Avengers’.

This misfit group of socially inept & highly intelligent introverts is put together by the British government under the watchful eye of Charles Dance's Commander Denniston. Turing’s problem comes in the fact that Denniston does not suffer fools gladly. He expects results and he expects results quickly. Turing doesn't get off to the best of starts as he manages to alienate not only Denniston but the rest of his code breaking team as well. Just to add insult to injury Turing writes a letter to Churchill himself asking for one hundred thousand pounds to build his code breaking machine (this was back when one hundred thousand pounds was a lot of money) and to be put in charge. To Denniston's disgust both requests are granted and he is forced, at least temporarily, to watch Turing and company from the shadows.

Once Turing receives his funds he sets about building a 'thinking machine' which he calls Christopher. This machine is basically ground zero for what now has become the modern day computer. The reason Turing decides to build Christopher is fundamental one. The Enigma machine is capable of offering up north of one hundred million combinations and the code key changes every twenty four hours.
The key to cracking the messages comes when they discover one of the older messages they have on file ends with the phrase 'Heil Hitler'. From that simple premise the instruct Christopher to only work on a small part of the messages they deal with on a daily basis. Thus drastically reducing its thinking time and also the amount of combinations it has to work through.
Christopher cracks the message and ultimately wins Britain and its allies the war. It's been estimated that Turing’s work, along with his colleagues, shortened the Second World War by more than two years and saved hundreds of thousands of lives in the process. Winston Churchill is quoted as saying 'Alan Turing contributed more than any individual to winning the war'.
However once the Enigma machine had been cracked it presented the team with a new problem. They had to limit the amount of decoded messages they could act upon. If Hitler had thought for even just an instant that Enigma had been compromised then he'd have ordered it to be replaced with something else and the allies would have been back to square one again.

The film itself also deals with the personal relationship between Cumberbatch's Turing and Knightly's Clarke as they work together. The two become close and in an attempt to stop Clarke's father removing her from Bletchley he proposes to her. Knowing that ultimately he that cares for her but could never love her and give Clarke due to his own sexuality.

The film is split over three timelines. When it starts in the mid nineteen fifties we find Turing sitting in a police interview room, having been arrested for being caught with a man whilst committing homosexual acts in public. During the course of the police investigation we then move back to Turing as a young man as he struggles to fit in at boarding school. It's worth pointing out that the actor Alex Lawther who plays the young Turing is nothing short of exceptional. He's compelling and emotionally vulnerable and I suspect he'll become a household name in the not too distant future. The main section of the film centres on his work during the Second World War and it’s this story that the rest of the film is hung from. Cutting back and forth you start to understand he is, what he did for his fellow man and what would ultimately be his undoing. Turing is found guilty of indecent behaviour and is given the option of two years in prison or chemical castration. He opts for the latter as he knows he'd never survive in prison and as he tells Knightly's Clarke, he couldn't bear to be split from his computer, which has now taken residency in the front room of his house. Turning suffers a great deal from the chemicals he is forced to take and during his second year of punishment he takes his own life.

This is the English-language debut of Norwegian director Morten Tyldum and it has to be said as debuts go it’s astonishing. Having cut his teeth in television miniseries and one Norwegian film called Headhunters he shows a level of understanding in the subject matter that is second to none and directs the film with a level of confidence that is almost comparable with Turing’s intelligence and egotism. I suspect that Tyldum will be fielding a lot of calls from Hollywood over the coming months and will be able to pick and choose is upcoming projects with a lot more freedom than he is used to. He’s only just past his mid-forties and I wouldn’t mind betting that his best work is still untapped and waiting to be unleashed.

The Imitation game may not make it onto a lot of peoples ‘must see’ lists and that’s a shame. There may be better films that have been released this year like Boyhood, Nightcrawler and the soon to be seen Birdman but of all the films i've  had the pleasure of watching over the course of twenty fourteen The Imitation Game towers head and shoulders above them all. I cannot commend this film enough. I hope it gets the recognition it so thoroughly deserves in during the upcoming awards season and Benedict gets the Best Actor nod at the Oscars he so absolutely warrants. It should also be mentioned that this is the first film I can think of where Keira Knightly has actually been given a script that allows her to act. She is every bit Cumberbatch’s equal in this and would also be worthy of any and all praise coming her way.


Twitter Review:
Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.
#Powerful&ThoughtProvoking

Useful Links:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2084970/?ref_=nv_sr_1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5CjKEFb-sM
http://www.empireonline.com/reviews/review.asp?FID=138404

Interstellar

So where to start with Interstellar? Well, firstly it needs to be pointed out that when you pays your money and puts your bums down in either the local multiplex or sofa of your choice Interstellar isn't the film that's been advertised. When you sit down and start to watch Mr Nolan's grand old space opera you also get a ghost story with a bit of a time travel shenanigans thrown in for good measure. From the start to the finish of its one hundred and sixty nine minute journey you are taken on a joyride of stunning visuals, complex acting and a screenplay that never lets you get complacent and demands your complete and full attention. This coupled with a few emotional gut punches and the possibility of sometime paradoxes that would even have Dr Who scratching his head, it is safe to say that this is a 'thinking person’s' science fiction film.

Having just finished directing his third Batman film and completing the trilogy in style, Christopher Nolan went looking for his next challenge. He found it in a script that had been floating around Hollywood for over the last ten years. Written by his brother Jonathan and good enough to have Steven Spielberg attached to direct back in 2006, it was a tale of a doomed earth and its quest for humanity to survive. The Nolan brothers then joined forces once Christopher signed on to helm the project and they then went back and tweaked the story and made it more about character and less about special effects.
On the subject of special effects it does also need to be pointed out that Christopher Nolan doesn't like having to use CGI if the shot can be done practically. He is not a fan of having to use green screens. The best example I can give of this is from The Dark Knight. When you see the truck flip over in the middle of downtown Gotham you're actually watching a truck being flipped over. No computer effects. No camera trickery. It’s just a very heavy truck going base over apex and being executed flawlessly. It's also worth pointing out for the record that you are not likely to ever see a Nolan film in 3D. He's not a fan on the genre at all. He'd far rather put his visual 'bang for your buck' into filming with IMAX. So when you watch Interstellar remember that although some of what you see and take in will have to have had some computer wizardry behind it but it won't be anywhere near as much as you think.

So back to the plot. The story of Interstellar is set in the not too distant future. A ‘blight’ has systematically wiped out all but one of the Earths crops, corn, and decimated the world’s population. With no known cure it's only a matter of time before corn fell victim to the same 'blight'.
Humanity has also rejected technology and all the evils that come with it. So much so that the NASA Moon landings from the sixties and seventies are now taught as being fake propaganda. Government money as far as the public are concerned is now spent on the plain and simple things. Making sure that the day to day life of what's left of the population isn't overly complicated and that survival is everyone's top priority.

The hero of our piece is Mathew McConaughay's 'Cooper'. He's an ex NASA pilot, one of those dying breed of men carved out of 'the right stuff' and would happily fly anything he could get his hands on until the wings fell off. Cooper, who has turned his hand to being a farmer since the space program has long since been shut down, lives with his son & daughter, who at the start of the film are played by Mackenize Foy and Timothee Chalamet respectively. Rounding out this family foursome is the father of his now departed wife who just happens to be played by John Lithgow. Just a quick aside here. Interstellar has a lot of what I like to call 'Snuck in a real actor syndrome' when it comes to the smaller parts or S.I.A.R.A.S. for short when it comes to the supporting cast and smaller roles.
Together they survive dirt and dust storms. The trials and tribulations of being potentially one of the last generations to live on earth and the unspoken heartache of the ticking clock of fate.

Now Interstellar is another one of those films it's impossible to talk about without going into spoiler territory. But as a lot of what happens is to do with time travel I thought I'd put the 'spoiler alert' at the end. And if you don't think that makes sense, go see the film!

So once the pleasantries of the first fifteen or so minutes of the film have passed, everyone has been introduced and we find strange things happening in the Cooper household. Coop's daughter Murph is experiencing strange going ones in her bedroom. Loud bangs, books falling of her bookshelves. Murph, who is her father’s daughter, tries to record these strange happening’s and get some concrete evidence of the phenomenon. This is all brought to a head during a particularly nasty dust storm Murph realises she's left her bedroom window open. When Coop and co get up there they find that the dust is falling into patterns on the floor. Cue a bit of deductive logic and Coop realises that these are map coordinates. And as luck would have it they only happen to for a location in the middle of nowhere, a couple of hours drive from their home. So Coop hops into his truck with Murph as a hidden stowaway and before you can say 'oh look we appear to have stumbled across a secret base of some kind' they stumble across a secret base of some kind.
Now from here on in you do need your wits about you to keep up with what's going on. I'll try and keep it relatively simple but basically this is what happens...

It turns out that the government of the good old U S of A have been secretly funding the supposedly defunct NASA so they can go and find other planets for the remainder of the human population to go live on. This 'Plan A' has a backup 'Plan B' which is basically a very select few find a planet to go and live on and then with the help of a few thousand frozen embryos 'make with the babies'. Both plans happen to be possible due to the mysterious discovery of a stable wormhole next to that there Saturn. Now the fact that it's stable and also doesn't move leads NASA to the conclusion that it must have been placed there deliberately by an alien race in order to help us. The whole operation 'bugger off and go and live somewhere else' is being run by Professor Brand, played by Michael Caine (S.I.A.R.A.S.) and assisted by his daughter, known for the most part as Brand, played by Cat Fantine, sorry Ann Hathaway. Between the two of them they tell Coop about their mission to try and colonise other worlds. They brief him about a secret mission launched ten years ago, which took twelve people and sent each of them through the wormhole on what effectively was a recon mission, to search for planets on the other side.
This twelve man team was led by the mysterious Dr. Mann (S.I.A.R.A.S.) who gets described as the best of us.

Everyone still with me? Good, I'll carry on. So they convince Coop to be the pilot of the follow up mission and along with Ann Hathaway's Brand and a couple of other mission specialist who would be wearing red if this was a Star Trek film.
Along with the human crew they are also accompanied by two robots called Case and Tars. These robots without giving too much away are set up as potentially being bad. At times they are almost like mobile versions of HAL from 2001, which isn't the only comparison you can draw from Mr Kubrick's science fiction classic. Case and Tars monolithic in shape, have quiet soothing voices and must do what they are instructed.

Coop goes back home and breaks the news to this family that he's leaving. Despite another coded message from the books in Murph’s bedroom which turns out to say 'Stay'. Now as I said before you do need to concentrate on what happens after Coop and co blast off and a lot of what you see needs to be experienced first-hand and not read about. Coop and his team spend a couple of hours on a planet’s surface and then once they get back to their main ship they have to deal with the fact that over twenty three years will have passed on Earth, Due to there being a black hole on the other side of the wormhole and the wibbly wobbly timey winey issues that come with that. This leads to some very powerful scenes where Coop has to watch twenty three years of video messages from his son and daughter, now played by Casey Affleck and Jessica Chastain (S.I.A.R.A.S.)

In closing I’ll say this. Interstellar is an astonishingly well-made film. I found the science side of the story hard to follow at times and I’m still trying to get my head around the fact that gravity is now the fifth dimension, time being the forth. There are also so parts of the film where I sat there thinking to myself ‘really?’ but the script and set pieces more than make up for the any misgivings I have.  I think that there’s also a possibility that there could be sequels to Interstellar in the not too distant future, or should that be in the not too distant past. But I think that will be dependent on the studio bean counters being happy with their lot and keeping shareholders happy. Oh and if you like the occasional use of church organs in your film scores then Hans Zimmer’s musical arrangement’s my  just be right up your alley!

Spoiler Alert…

Twitter Review:
Interstellar should get a best picture nod but i doubt it will. Visceral & compelling. Hard to watch at times but a must see.
#GhostParadox

Useful links:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0816692/fullcredits?ref_=tt_cl_sm#cast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSWdZVtXT7E
http://www.empireonline.com/reviews/review.asp?FID=138121