Morten Tyldum – Movie Musings

Benedict Cumberbatch saves the world in smug, empty mess The Imitation Game

Director: Morten Tyldum

Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch (Alan Turing), Keira Knightley (Joan Clarke), Matthew Goode (Hugh Alexander), Rory Kinnear (Detective Nock), Allen Leech (John Cairncross), Matthew Beard (Peter Hilton), Charles Dance (Commander Alastair Dennison), Mark Strong (Maj General Stewart Menzies)

“Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things no one can imagine”. If there is anything that captures the smug self-satisfaction of this ludicrously pleased-with-itself film, it’s that convoluted phrase, with which the film is so pleased that it is repeated no fewer than four times. What does it mean really? Nothing of course, it carries all the meaning of a fortune cookie. Turing is certainly someone whom you could expect something of, since the film is at pains from the start to demonstrate he is a maths prodigy and a genius. But then that would spoil the romance of the film suggesting that because Turing is socially maladjusted, he is somehow unlikely to achieve something – or that achieving something would be even more special having overcome the “disability” of his personality.

Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) is under police suspicion in 1951 after a mysterious break-in at his Manchester home. A keen detective (Rory Kinnear) suspects he may be a Russian agent – why else does he have no military record? But we know different, as flashbacks show Turing working at Bletchley Park on the cracking of the German cipher machine Enigma. Working with the support of an MI6 officer (Mark Strong), Turing has to win the trust of his team – with the support of best friend and maths genius Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley) – to build a ground-breaking computer that could crack the impossible code. But back in 1951, Turing is in trouble: he’s gay and that’s a crime in post-war Britain.

Now, Turing’s personality in this film. In real life, Turing was an eccentric, but perfectly capable of functioning perfectly normally in society. That’s not dramatic enough for the film, so Turing is reimagined as someone practically afflicted by Aspergers syndrome, incapable of understanding or relating to people without severe effort and prompting. Of course this is really there to introduce conflict – first with his team (who need to be won round to loving the old eccentric genius), secondly with his boss (who can’t stand his inability to fit in) and thirdly with the police (who can use it to write him off). It’s a film-disability for a character to overcome, another puffed up triumph that we can celebrate, while at the same time pat ourselves on the back because this is a victory for those “not normal”. But it’s probably bollocks.

But then that fits in rather nicely with the whole film, which is more or less probably bollocks from start to finish. The film of course can’t dramatise maths or computing very well, so it throws us all sorts of feeble clichés from tired old film genres instead. Charles Dance plays a reimagined Denniston (in real life a cryptographer) as a standard obstructive boss who all but shrieks “you’re off the case Turing!” at the one-hour mark. The key moment of inspiration of course comes from flirty pub conversation with a charming secretary. Running around and frantic throwing of papers takes the place of all that boring maths.

The film can’t resist any level of dramatic cliché. When a member of the code-breaking team mentions in passing “I have a brother in the navy you know”, as sure as eggs is eggs you can bet the team will decipher a message that could save his life but will be forced to make A Terrible Choice. Of course even this picture of a small code-breaking team making the calls themselves over which messages to act on is nonsense – it’s a decision that would be so far above their pay grade, they should be taking oxygen just thinking about it. But in this bonkers version of the universe, Turing himself makes the call to keep the initial breaking of the code a secret, and the government happily allows him alone to make the call about which codes to act on. Oh for goodness sake, spare me.

But then this is a film that wants to turn Turing into the man who won the war single-handed. While Turing was one of the key figures who made the breakthrough, this was a massive team effort, not one man’s inspiration, and reducing the victory of the war down to one (film cliché) difficult genius is the same old ripe nonsense we’ve seen many, many times before. The film tries to pretend that Bletchley Park and the breaking of Enigma, and Turing himself, is an unknown story – when it’s been pretty well-known since it was announced by the Government in the 1980s.

The film is rubbish, but it’s also gutless. Of course “fifth man” John Cairncross is part of the team – and of course Turing discovers he is a spy. (The reveal of course is due to the same old tedious movie cliché of “I found a book on his desk that was the key book he used for the code”.) And then in a moment of stunning tastelessness, Cairncross blackmails Turing into keeping his mouth shut which he agrees to do – an action that, if it had ever happened in real life, would have been an appalling moment of treachery from Turing, and reinforces all the suspicions of the time that homosexuals couldn’t be trusted.

Ah yes, homosexuality. This film is very, very, very proud of its crusading actions to expose the cruel treatment of Turing for his homosexuality. At the same time, the film is of course way too gutless to even begin to show Turing doing anything actually gay (he doesn’t even so much as hold another man’s hand) during the film. The one genuine moment of love the character is allowed to express, is in the form of a crush on a schoolfriend. (The film substitutes renaming Turing’s machine “Victory” after this school friend “Christopher”, the film keen to try and plug the gap of this film featuring virtually no LGBTQ content at all). But the film preaches intensly and proudly about the equal rights of homosexuality, while veering away with squeamishness from putting anything remotely homosexual on the screen.

The shoddy writing, over-written and self-important, is matched up with Morten Tyldum’s flat, “prestige” film-making that reduces everything to a chocolate box. The film does have some acting beyond what it deserves. Benedict Cumberbatch is good as Turing, although his performance is a remix of some of his greatest hits from past projects, from Hawking to Sherlock, and you feel hardly it’s a stretch for him – even if he plays with it real, and genuine, emotional commitment. Keira Knightley’s cut-glass accent is practically a cliché, but this is one of her best performances with real warmth and empathy. Most of the rest of the cast though are serviceable at best.

“Serviceable”, however, is still better than the film itself, which is a cliché-ridden, gutless, plodding and highly average pile of nothing at all – a totally over-hyped, over-promoted and completely empty film that is about a zillion times less interesting, brave or revealing than Hugh Whitemore’s 1980s play Breaking the Code. Not worth your time.

Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt juggle moral dilemmas in the surprisingly dark Passengers

Director: Morten Tyldum

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence (Aurora Lane), Chris Pratt (Jim Preston), Michael Sheen (Arthur), Laurence Fishburne (Gus Mancuso)

The Avalon is a spaceship carrying over 5,000 passengers and crew to a new planet for resettlement. With the flight due to last 120 years, everyone is in suspended animation. After an accident, passenger Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) is woken 90 years early. Trapped on the ship, unable to return to cyrosleep or change the direction of the ship, and with the round-trip time for messages to Earth being 76 years, Jim faces living the rest of his life alone on a spaceship. After over a year of isolation, with only android bartender Arthur (Michael Sheen) for company, Jim succumbs to temptation and wakes another passenger, Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence), for companionship. They fall in love over time – but how will Aurora react when she finds out the truth?

Passengers was a film that received a negative reaction perhaps because it managed to successfully not spoiler its plot in advance. While the trailer seemed to promise this would combine mystery and romance in a space setting, it’s actually more about the effects of isolation and the moral quandary of relieving your own despair by placing someone else in the same position. While the film is never going to win awards for its exploration of psychosis, it certainly tries to tackle this idea and explain – but not excuse – why Jim takes the decision he does.

A lot of people felt this suggested Aurora effectively falls in love with her kidnapper-cum-stalker, and that Jim’s actions are glossed over. Well I’d argue against this. Firstly, the film never shirks the repercussions of Jim’s decisions – indeed that’s really what the film is about: can you forgive the unforgiveable? A large chunk of the film is a build up to Jim taking a decision he acknowledges is wrong, and feels tremendous guilt and shame about. The later section of the film revolves around the impact of this action coming to light. Discovery of the truth destroys Aurora and Jim’s relationship, and it’s uncertain for much of the rest of the film whether there will ever be any forgiveness for Jim. If the film had shelved the issue, or Jim had been forgiven within minutes of screentime, that would be another question.

Secondly, the film works hard to show the savage psychological impact of complete isolation, and (after a year of this) the dangerous temptation of having a companion a push of a button away. Jim is clearly not in his right mind when he makes his decision – and later when Aurora faces the prospect of similar isolation, she responds with similar despair. If there is a fault with this, it is that the film shies away from defining the time progression explicitly enough – and doesn’t quite have the courage to increase its timeline (imagine if Jim had been alone for 3-5 years rather than one. Imagine if Jim and Aurora had not spoken for 2-3 years rather than one etc. Straightaway, I think the actions in this film could have been more readily understood by people).

Thirdly, these questions of isolation and morality are not as black and white as your casual internet moaner would like. Trapped alone with no human interaction, with literally zero chance of being rescued, is a psychological situation it’s just impossible to comprehend. Expecting people to behave as they would normally is simply unreasonable. Jim and Aurora do not fall in love after the truth comes out – they fall in love well before this (sure Aurora doesn’t know what Jim has done, but her feelings for him are real) – so it becomes a question of forgiving someone you love who, in extraordinary circumstances, has done something they normally would never do.

As such, Passengers is actually the sort of film where it will benefit you to discover more about what the film is going to be about before you go into it (and how often do you hear that?). Because, once you know the sort of film you are going to get, it’s not that bad a film. It’s handling of these moral issues is, I’ll readily admit, not the most effective or thought provoking (and the lack of mention of it before the film’s release, and its slight fudging through the film, suggests the “suits” weren’t happy with it either) but at least this is a film with some ideas behind it. If it had really seized the effect of isolation as its theme, and really explored the moral issues behind Jim’s actions, it might well have avoided much of the criticism. But it does enough to make some of that criticism unfair.

Away from this main plot point, Passengers is an entertaining, high-budget, character piece. Whatever your view of the character, you can’t argue against Pratt’s charisma and wit as a performer and Lawrence is also good. It’s not their best work, but they make the relationship – with all its peaks and troughs – work, and it’s endearing or tense as required. Michael Sheen is also excellent as the humanish-but-not-human-enough android bartender. The design of the ship is imaginative and the film looks gorgeous. The second half of the film delivers a fine series of tense set-ups (even if many of them are echoes of things we have seen before), and Tyldum does well to ensure that the often swiftly changing mood of the film (despair-romance-anger-tension-danger-terror etc.) seems like a smooth progression rather than a jarring one.

Passengers doesn’t have the courage of its convictions to really explore its “Ben Gunn in Space” set-up, and much of the criticism of its plot stems from its not-completely-committed exploration of the effects of isolation. But, if you know what you are going to get, it’s an entertaining film.