I went to see "Enigma" because the History Channel is on a lot in my house, so I've heard all about about Ultra and the Enigma code-breaking machine and the brains who secretly won WWII for the good guys so by osmosis I know quite a bit about it. But I'm sure history buffs will not appreciate the inaccuracies in a fictional story overlaid on the true background let alone objections to intellectual hothouse Bletchley Park being portrayed as a lot hotter for other things than first generation computers.
So while I assume the stuttering mathematician tertiary character is supposed to be Alan Turing, there's no mention of what he really contributed to the effort let alone how he was hounded out of the intelligence service for being homosexual.
Rather here it's the opposite, with a twisty spy suspense story (Tom Stoppard's screenplay from a novel) about a broken-hearted, broken-down straight mathematician trying to break code while breaking secrets about the woman he's obsessed with (and either I missed something or I didn't quite get his moral outrage against secret agent Jeremy Northram or he was representing a less cynical age with less exposure to agents being out in the cold).
Dougray Scott is haggardly good, looking so much like Tom Courtenay (while playing a character named Tom) that it helped me place him in the period; he should have played Tom's son in "Last Orders") and Kate Winslet makes good use of her then pregnancy towards being almost dumpy looking.
(originally written 4/28/2002)
So while I assume the stuttering mathematician tertiary character is supposed to be Alan Turing, there's no mention of what he really contributed to the effort let alone how he was hounded out of the intelligence service for being homosexual.
Rather here it's the opposite, with a twisty spy suspense story (Tom Stoppard's screenplay from a novel) about a broken-hearted, broken-down straight mathematician trying to break code while breaking secrets about the woman he's obsessed with (and either I missed something or I didn't quite get his moral outrage against secret agent Jeremy Northram or he was representing a less cynical age with less exposure to agents being out in the cold).
Dougray Scott is haggardly good, looking so much like Tom Courtenay (while playing a character named Tom) that it helped me place him in the period; he should have played Tom's son in "Last Orders") and Kate Winslet makes good use of her then pregnancy towards being almost dumpy looking.
(originally written 4/28/2002)