The Imitation Game is a 2014 American biographical thriller film directed by Morten Tyldum and written by Graham Moore, based on the 1983 biography Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges.

When Britain declares war on Germany in 1939, Turing joins the cryptography team of Hugh Alexander, John Cairncross, Peter Hilton, Keith Furman, and Charles Richards in Bletchley Park, directed by Commander Alastair Denniston.

Historians estimate that breaking Enigma shortened the war by over two years, saving over 14 million lives; and Turing's work was an important step towards today's computers.

Before Cumberbatch joined the project, Warner Bros. bought the screenplay for a reported seven-figure sum because of Leonardo DiCaprio's interest in playing Turing.

However, production designer Maria Djurkovic admitted that her team made the machine more cinematic by making it larger and having more of its internal mechanisms visible.

[28] Princeton University Press and Vintage Books both released film tie-in editions of Andrew Hodges' biography Alan Turing: The Enigma in September 2014.

[31] In November 2014, the Weinstein Company co-hosted a private screening of the film with Digital Sky Technologies billionaire Yuri Milner and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Attendees of the screening at Los Altos Hills, California included Silicon Valley's top executives, such as Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Airbnb's Nathan Blecharczyk, and Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.

[34] The official film website allowed visitors to unlock exclusive content by solving cryptic crossword puzzles supposedly conceived by Turing.

[38] In November 2014, ahead of the film's US release, The New York Times reprinted the 1942 puzzle from The Daily Telegraph used in recruiting codebreakers at Bletchley Park during the Second World War.

[9] The US distributor TWC stated that the film would initially debut in four cinemas in Los Angeles and New York, expanding to six new markets on December 12, before being released nationwide on Christmas Day.

[47] The Imitation Game was released on March 31, 2015, in the United States in two formats: a one-disc standard DVD and a Blu-ray with a digital copy of the film.

The site's critical consensus reads: "With an outstanding starring performance from Benedict Cumberbatch illuminating its fact-based story, The Imitation Game serves as an eminently well-made entry in the 'prestige biopic' genre.

[56] The film received a rare average grade of "A+" from market-research firm CinemaScore, and a 90% "definite recommend" rating from its core audience, according to PostTrak.

[65] Critic Scott Foundas stated that the "movie is undeniably strong in its sense of a bright light burned out too soon, and the often undignified fate of those who dare to chafe at society's established norms".

Praise went to Knightley's supporting performance as Clarke, Goldenberg's editing, Desplat's score, Faura's cinematography and Djurkovic's production design.

[72][73] Foundas of Variety wrote that Cumberbatch's acting is "masterful ... a marvel to watch", Manohla Dargis of The New York Times described it as "delicately nuanced, prickly and tragic" and Owen Gleiberman of the BBC proclaimed it an "emotionally tailored perfection".

[76] In addition, Claudia Puig of USA Today concluded in her review, "It's Cumberbatch's nuanced, haunted performance that leaves the most powerful impression".

[78][79] Gossip blogger Roger Friedman wrote at the end of his review, "Cumberbatch may be the closest thing we have to a real descendant of Sir Laurence Olivier".

Anderson of Slate magazine compared the film's account of Turing's life and work to the biography it was based on, writing, "I discovered that The Imitation Game takes major liberties with its source material, injecting conflict where none existed, inventing entirely fictional characters, rearranging the chronology of events, and misrepresenting the very nature of Turing's work at Bletchley Park".

[86] Andrew Grant of Science News wrote, "... like so many other Hollywood biopics, it takes some major artistic license – which is disappointing, because Turing's actual story is so compelling.

"[87] Computing historian Thomas Haigh, writing in the journal Communications of the ACM, said that "the film is a bad guide to reality but a useful summary of everything that the popular imagination gets wrong about Bletchley Park", that it "combines the traditional focus of popular science writing on the lone genius who changes the world with the modern movie superhero narrative of a freak who must overcome his own flaws before he can save the world", and that, together with the likes of A Beautiful Mind and The Theory of Everything, is part of a trend of "glossy scientific biopic[s]" that emphasize those famous scientists who were surrounded by tragedy rather than those who found contented lives, which in turn affects the way "[s]ome kinds of people, and work, have become famous and others have not.

"[88] The visual blog Information Is Beautiful deduced that, while taking creative licence into account, the film was 42.3% accurate when compared to real-life events, commenting that "to be fair, shoe-horning the incredible complexity of the Enigma machine and cryptography in general was never going to be easy.

"We are proud to honor the stars and filmmakers of The Imitation Game for bringing the captivating yet tragic story of Alan Turing to the big screen", HRC president Chad Griffin said in a statement.

An open letter published in The Guardian urged the British government and the Royal family, particularly Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, to aid the campaign.

[97] In February 2015, Matt Damon, Michael Douglas, Jessica Alba, Bryan Cranston, and Anna Wintour among others joined the petition at Pardon49k.org demanding pardons for victims of anti-gay laws.

[98][99] Historians, including Justin Bengry of Birkbeck University of London and Matt Houlbrook of the University of Birmingham, argued that such a pardon would be "bad history" despite its political appeal, because of the broad variety of cases in which the historical laws were applied (including cases of rape) and the distortion of history resulting from an attempt to clean up the wrongdoings of the past post facto.

[102][103] During production, there was criticism regarding the film's purported downplaying of Turing's homosexuality,[104] particularly condemning the portrayal of his relationship with close friend and one-time fiancée Joan Clarke.

[28] In an interview for GQ UK, Matthew Goode, who plays fellow cryptographer Hugh Alexander in the film, stated that the script focuses on "Turing's life and how as a nation we celebrated him as being a hero by chemically castrating him because he was gay".

The visual blog Information is Beautiful deduced that, while taking creative license into account, the film was just 42.3% accurate when compared to real-life events, summarizing that "shoe-horning the incredible complexity of the Enigma machine and cryptography, in general, was never going to be easy.