The Imitation Game has had a constant presence amongst the nominees of the numerous awards this awards season but to me it seems as if its been largely ignored in favour of its competition. If you had asked me a year and a half ago I would have said this film would be the front runner for all the best picture awards because it is a biopic (which awards ceremonies love) of Alan Turing, an eccentric but highly troubled man and it featured a very talented cast. I’ve watched the movie twice now and twice I’ve been underwhelmed. When the film was green lit and the cast was being put together I did some of my own research and the man seems extraordinary and I was shocked I’d never heard of him before, he’d created the algorithm that I was using to search him and I knew nothing about him! His story was a rich one which would usually be prime for awards gold but The Imitation Game falls flat and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why.
Think back to a few months ago when the film premiered at TIFF it garnered near universal praise but there was one criticism that critics kept picking at, the lack of sex scenes for Turing. You see Turing was a war hero who wasn’t celebrated in his lifetime and ended up being convicted because he was a homosexual and his sentence was to be dosed with a substance that led to chemical castration. Critics were discussing the lack of gay sex scenes in the film and pointing out that it made the film less realistic, and although I hadn’t seen the film at the time I wasn’t inclined to side with the critics. I’m not a fan of featuring sex within a film just for the sake of it and in all honesty I didn’t see the point, you wouldn’t expect to see a heterosexual couple constantly in compromising positions in a biopic if theres no specific reason behind it so why would you see it here? Because the characters gay? Why should that character be treated any differently?
