Jayden Kahn - Week 2; Alan Turing and his Notorious Game - The Imitation Game

SPOILER ALERT!!!

    I just watched the movie The Imitation Game starring Benedict Cumberbatch and it blew me away. The movie follows the main character, Alan Turing, on his journey from professor to war hero. It focuses on Britain's struggle to break the extremely complex Enigma code used by Nazi Germany in World War II and how it was broken. 

    Turing, played by Cumberbatch, was a fellow or researcher at Cambridge University when he wrote his paper answering a question: Can a machine think? This paper, titled The Imitation Game, established himself as a respectable genius and also gave him credibility. He was later broached by Commander Denniston about joining them in decrypting the Enigma Code as World War II was starting. Despite Denniston's doubt, he brought Turing on board. This was the best decision of his life. For 2 years Turing worked endlessly on his machine to crack the code used by the Germans. His life's work, can machines think, inspired his project. Eventually, he figured out how to make the machine work after coming to a brilliant realization that there were certain words used in every weather report that came in the morning: weather and heil Hitler. He used these to program his machine into thinking faster by knowing what to look for. However, as put by Turing, this was the easy part. Now that they had broken the code, they had to keep it a secret as one wrong move could make the Germans suspicious and switch the entire system in a week. If the Germans found out that they had broken the code, it would just be immediately switched, and their nearly 3 years-long work would have been all for nothing. They had to think strategically. They statistically calculated every single event, the lives that were lost, the lives that were saved, and the chance of the Germans raising suspicion.

    This film has left me speechless. After watching it, it has already become my favorite movie ever. The acting in the movie was phenomenal. One can tell the actors were very passionate about their roles and the characters became a part of them. In addition, the writing was amazing and the directing and producing were on par with everything else. The movie kept me on my toes at all times until the eventual drop when Turing commits suicide due to hormonal pills for being a homosexual. The film ended up getting nominated for 8 different Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, Best Supporting Actress, and more. Not only did everything done by the makers of this movie make it feel real and special, but it also conveyed the main message to the audience clearly - Alan Turing and his team were the true heroes and saviors of World War II.

   Turing was always one step ahead of the game - every minute detail was precisely calculated by Turing and his team. He was very passionate about his work and only wanted to help and succeed. Despite being seen as abnormal, he is a hero and a genius. What can you do to contribute to the world?