FILM The imitation game PRODUCTION: USA, UK 2014 DIRECTOR: Morten Tyldum STARRING: Benedict Cumberbatch (Alan Turing), Keira Knightley (Joan Clarke), Matthew Goode (Hugh Alexander). A SYNOPSYS During World War II, the mathematician Alan Turing joins a team of code-breakers at Britain top-secret Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park to try to decipher the code of the German Enigma machine. The problem is that Enigma is recorded every day. That means that even if the team can decipher a coded message, that code would be obsolete the next day. There are 159,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible codes that could be input into Enigma. While the rest of the team works on breaking the day-to-day codes because they believe it is the only way to learn the secret of Enigma, Alan works by himself on developing a machine, with a sort of artificial intelligence, which he believes will be able not only to break a daily code, but also to break any code immediately when it is input into Enigma. The problem, of course, is convincing his superiors to fund the building of the machine. The arrival of the only female member in the team, the brilliant Joan Clarke, provides Alan with a sense of how to manage a team. Alan and his team are able to crack the code, with the help of Alan s machine, by concentrating their search on repeated patterns used in weather forecasts by the Germans. An Enigma machine BEFORE VIEWING 1 Read the synopsis and answer the questions. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Who was Alan Turing? What did he do during WW2? What was Enigma? What was the problem with Enigma? What was Alan working on? What was the contribution of Joan Clarke? 278 Module 6 UPGRADING A reproduction of Turing s machine for the film