The movie acts coy about Turing being gay, with a cop at the beginning of the movie looking at the camera and saying, "I think Mister Turing has something to hide!" and then waiting until halfway through the movie to "reveal" that he's gay. This is made worse by an obnoxious subplot that takes place in Turing's schoolboy years that makes his boy love abundantly clear and serves no other purpose but to do so. The movie spends half of its runtime on a bullshit 'prickly genius needs to learn how to get along with people' plot that was far more effectively done in The Social Network, comes alive for twenty minutes or so with some actual code-breaking and discussion about the ethics of keeping their knowledge a secret, and then, finally, gets into the British government's prosecution and persecution of him. But then it merely talks about his trial and conviction, and then glosses over his suicide with some end titles. This, after tossing in a rancid joke about cyanide--his method of suicide--in that awful opening scene.
The movie wants to make some big statement about how shoddily the British government treated a national hero based on his sexuality, but ends up treating his sexuality, and his heroism, shoddily in turn. I've heard of form fitting content, but this is fucking ridiculous. That it's being nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay is a travesty of art and gay politics.
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I would also point out to the idea that the British were able to diminish the time of the war and leave them and the Americans as the major winners of it, which is nothing sort of propagandistic. It requires not only to ignore the Pacific Theater of War but also the fact that the Soviets were the ones that made Hitler killed himself when they stormed Berlin. It was the Spviet Union, and not Great Britain and certainly not the US, who played the decisive role in the war. Alan Turing can certainly be thanked for inventing a machine that managed to halt the German conquest of the United Kingdom, but that's about it.
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