Benedict does as well as we've come to expect from his handling of awkward characters; he weaves back and forth between authoritative and pitiful while presenting a gentle emotionality alongside an intense and encompassing passion. Knightly is much more likable here as the stubbornly successful female than in anything else I've seen her in, and the supporting cast does well with the screen time they're given.
There's a lot going on in this film, perhaps too much, as the plot never seems to rest heavily enough on one problem to really pull it into focus. Turing is an arrogant jerk for a few scenes but has the rest of his crew coming to his defense a short time later. War-time shots emphasized the urgency of the task at hand but never to the point where the pressure and the panic broke through so that I felt them myself. The high points - his proposal, his success - are never too high, and the low points - the the brother's dilemma, the confrontation about the spy, the ending - aren't too low, because it's on to the next thing right away. But the events themselves are each important and I wouldn't have wanted them to be skipped over for extra drama.
The chronology is not straightforward and I did get mixed up a few times, but it serves to empower one of my favourite scenes. Turing's description of his eponymous test will no doubt get the brunt of the attention of the people not already familiar with the context. I don't think that scene would have been as strong if it had begun the film - you really needed to see him at work first to know that you had to pay close attention - but I do feel like that's where it properly belonged. His final line and expression at the end of the interrogation was perfect and foreboding.
The most important and frustrating part of the film for me was the homosexuality issue and the sort of indifference that it was treated with by the characters. The detective is the only one who really has what I would call the *good* reaction to the whole circumstance, but he communicates it as disappointment with where he thought his case was headed as opposed to hesitance about prosecuting something so ultimately trivial. I felt so much disgust and vitriol at the end for the utter waste of the great intelligence and amazing life that were Alan Turing's and had no one to take it out on. This was no cathartic victory, and the little blurb at the end about the Queen's fucking "pardon" in 2013 was the cherry on the cake of indignation that I felt. I'm interested to see if anyone else has a similar reaction.
Anyways, I came away feeling very sad and miserable but also inspired by the story and by the great feat of effort and thinking that not only cracked the code but forever changed the world. Everyone should know about this, really. And we shouldn't need an offended Kiera Knightly at the end to communicate the wrong - but of course we shouldn't need to watch a genius fade into a suicidal demise for us to get it either. Damn shame.
edit: I should say, as a sort of rejoinder, that the film doesn't make it seem like he killed himself solely because of his homosexuality, and in fact I appreciated being shown how the burdens of secrecy and difficult personal relationships wore him down. Maybe that had something to do with his willingness to contemplate the possibility of artificial minds and people. I also thought the "motto" of the film was bandied about a little too casually at times. Okay now I'm done.
