A good movie

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this movie, but since Kate Winslet was starring, I was really eager to check it out. Basically, it is one of her more obscure movies and even though she is shown very prominently on all the promotional material, she is not in fact the main character. But, it didn’t matter and I thought it was actually a really decent WWII feature. The biggest issue I have with movies dealing with WWII is that I have seen so many of them and, nowadays, to really impress me, they either need to be really brilliant or they need to tell me something I haven’t heard already 100 times before. And this movie, even though it was nothing really amazing, definitely belonged to this 2nd category. Indeed, I thought it was pretty neat that they focused on those cryptanalysts (the people who were cracking those codes) , to see approximately how they worked and I also enjoyed the fact that we were dealing here with some men and women actually using their brain to solve some issues instead of the usual macho trigger happy kind of guys. Of course, the twists were rather far-fetched and the love story was rather unnecessary, especially after you read that the main character was based on a real life person called Alan Turing who was notoriously homosexual, prosecuted for it and even chemically castrated via estrogen hormone injections (!) (That could have made a great story actually) . Still, the directing by Michael Apted, a usually underrated director, was pretty solid, there was a nice cast (Dougray Scott, Kate Winslet, Saffron Burrows, Jeremy Northam, Tom Hollander , Matthew Macfadyen, Corin Redgrave) and, above all, it was a very interesting subject. To conclude, even though it is nothing really mind-blowing, it remains a decent WWII feature and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you like the genre.

7/10