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The Enigma Machine By Alan Turing

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The idea that one person can change the course of human history is a crazy and incredible one; however, in the case of Alan Turing it appears to be true. Due to the nature of his work during World War II people are only just know learning how vital this man truly was not just to winning the war, but to creating the technology we use every day. During the war, Turing worked at Bletchley Park which housed the code breakers who helped decipher intelligence communication to help the Allies defeat Nazi Germany. Turing was invaluable to Bletchley as his work dealt with deciphering the Enigma Machine, which everyone in the world believed to be unbreakable. The machine had multiple rotors which were interchangeable and changed at varying speeds each …show more content…

These characters help show how hard the decisions Turing had to make were and just how strong of a person he had to be. After cracking enigma they realize that they can’t stop every attack because if they did then the Germans would know that they had broken their code. Peter (Alan’s coworker) says that his brother is on one of the ships that is about to be attacked but it’s an attack that they cannot stop. Peter’s cries to the others to stop this one attack are used to emotionally connect with the audience and force them to ask the question “would I have been able to make those decisions?”. The close ups of the people and soldiers in the train station after cracking the code also drive the emotional turmoil within the film. By the time the third time zone gets to its final resolution the audience knows all they need to know about Alan and his time during the war, but what Tyldum and Moore end with is what happened after the war was …show more content…

He was discovered and forced to undergo hormonal therapy that severely messed with his mind and body. Alan Turing ended up committing suicide on June 7th 1954. The end of the film says that “Historians estimate that breaking enigma shortened the war by more than two years saving over 14 million lives.” Alan Turing’s genius and strength should never be over looked or underestimated because without him millions of people would have perished and an entire scientific field might not even exist. Alan theorized a universal machine that wouldn’t just “Be programmable but reprogrammable” (The Imitation Game). They used to be called Turing machines, now a days we call them computers and we use them for almost everything. What this film focuses on is the tag line “Sometimes it’s the very people who no one imagines anything of, who do the things that no one can imagine” and they stick with that theme by focusing on Alan and his life not just enigma. While the game he invented was for testing for artificial intelligence, Moore uses it to show how people can be different but still do incredible things, and that’s okay. Alan Turing was this incredibly brilliant and strong man who just so happened to also be homosexual. He did all of these incredible and wonderful things but because of prejudice and people refusing to accept the differences of others this great mind was silenced. Telling the story of Alan Turing

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