Darmawan Truong Assignment 2

The Imitation Game is loosely based on the life of Alan Turing, A cryptanalyst and mathematician who paved the way for modern day computers. The film begins in England some time after world war 2 with two policemen investigating a break in to Turing's house. One of the officers becomes suspicious of Turing after looking up his records and finding his military records were non-existent or classified. Believing Turing to be a Soviet spy, he pushes for a case against Turing and eventually interrogates him. Turing begins to tell his story of what he did during the war.
At the start of world war 2, Turing is hired for a code-breaking job at Bletchley Park, to decode German communications used by the Nazis during the war. At first he finds it difficult to work with others and the team find his strange because of his inability to pick up on social norms and his introverted nature. Eventually the decoding work shows no signs of progress and tension starts to rise between the team. This leads Turing to search for new team members by putting a difficult crossword puzzle in the newspaper and asking people to solve it under a time limit. Joan Clarke ends up joining the team and together the team worked on Turing's machine which he believed would break the code faster than doing it by hand. After months of no success the British government move to fire Turing but his team defends him saying that the machine is the only chance of breaking the code. Eventually the team is able to crack the code using preset words and phrases instead of searching at random. However, They are unable to reveal their findings for fear of the Germans finding out and changing the encryption. Instead they opt to only apply the knowledge they receive using statistics and when there is an alternative cover story that could explain the victory. After the war, the team is instructed to destroy all their research and act as if the whole thing had never happened. With the interrogation coming to a close Turing asks the policeman to judge him and asks whether he is a human or a machine to which the police man says he cannot judge him. Later on Turing is charged with gross indecency and agrees to take medicine to be chemically castrated in order to keep working. Joan visits him and finds him in a very weak and deteriorated mentally and physically due to the medication. She reassures him that their work was worth it and that they did the right thing. After the movie it is revealed that breaking the enigmas code saved millions of lives and shortened the war by 2 years.

5 Words: Code, Machine, War, Secrecy, Sacrifice
Thesis Statement: The Imitation Game follows Alan Turing as he works to crack Enigma's code, a German encryption machine in order to help the allied forces in world war 2.