In case anyone is taken with an urge to go to the cinema to see Benedict Cumberbatch giving us his Alan Turing, I would suggest that those with a knowledge of his life either suspend their disbelief or don’t go. As a film in its own terms it’s not bad; crypto hardware nerds will appreciate the appearance of Bletchley’s bombe rebuild as a prop and an (unremarked) set of Zygalski Sheets [1] being used, there aren’t too many anachronisms to set your teeth on edge (although I’m pretty certain that senior military officers born in 1881 didn’t go around saying “you’re fired” to people) and both Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightly are more than competent.
But the distortions of the events are very substantial, both in terms of how Enigma was broken (unsurprisingly, as this isn’t a documentary) and in terms of the biographical details of his and other’s lives (which is slightly more surprising). Some of it’s just sub-McKee [2] “story arc” stuff. Joan Clark, played by Knightly, and others are shown as being recruited via some gambit involving crossword puzzles, when in fact Clark and most of the other later arrivals were simply recommended by their tutors and supervisors; she’d been taught by Gordon Welchman (who is completely written out of the story, oddly). Some of it is rather more substantial, and rather odd: there is a strange sub-plot which implies that the security services knew about John Cairncross (“The Fifth Man” in the Burgess-Maclean-Philby-Blunt ring) and used him as a back-channel to Stalin; to describe that as unlikely and unsupported is to be generous.
Were I a relative of Alistair Denniston I’d be upset, as he is shown as a petty martinet and vindictive incompetent, which (so far as one can tell from published sources) was not the case. Peter Hilton (later Mason Professor of Pure Mathematics at Birmingham, I see) is shown working on Enigma prior to the development of the bombe; the first bombe went into use in late 1940 and Hilton, only 18, didn’t arrive at Bletchley until 1942. Similarly, Jack Good didn’t arrive until mid-1941, long after the bombe’s development.
Andwere I Polish I’d be very upset indeed, as their massive contribution to Enigma is completely bypassed.