Leo DiCaprio slated to play Turing in biopic
Warner Bros has outbid other film studios to secure the rights to a script on the life of Alan Turing. The Time Warner studio paid an unspecified seven-figure sum for the rights to The Imitation Game, by first-time screenwriter Graham Moore. Moore's screenplay is an adoption of Alan Turing: The Enigma, a biography of the …
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Apparently in this new film Turing meets an attractive young woman while he is at MIT working on cracking the Enigma codes. After they marry the two go on to live a long and fulfilling life, probably with Turing single-handedly foiling a number of unlikely soviet schemes!
Sadly you're probably right
I can't imagine the Middle America focus groups accepting a gay man might have helped end World War II. And an English accent will only confuse them if he's neither a member of the royal family nor a super villain.
and then
single-handledly flies the plane with the nuclear bomb to drop on Hitler's bunker
Don't forget...
I hope they remember to include Hitler's master code inventor, Abdul.
Single handedly? My, no! She will be an expert in martial arts, and will fly through the air in bullet time cutting the heads of three adversaries in one go with her sword while she kicks the balls of three SS men three times her weight. All while our our absent minded hero stares oblivious into the nothingness, mentally computing some tough algorithm that will lead them to the end of level boss.
The hollywood version
Will have Alan Turing a grad student at <insert some US Ivy League University here>, a Football Jock and a chick magnet.
Just remember what they did to the Enigma story with U571
My favourite memory of U-571 was the little footnote at the end just before the credits rolled. It read something like "The US forces success in capturing intact the Enigma codebook marked a great Allied triumph in the war" and then in smaller font something along the lines of "The British had already done this twice and the Canadians once."
Im sure the gfx will be stunning... all them bits and bytes whizzing about at a few kb a minute. cool effects giving the impresssion of 100's of hours sat at a desk scribbling away with a pencil. possibly a cgi pipe being smoked...
but given:
a> merkins won the war
b> merkin scientists are the best (y'all heard of enistein and fermi right?)
c> a merkin invented the 'puter
d> merkins hate faggots
I suspect the facts in this story will be mangled beyond recognition.
could be worse, tom cruise could be in it.
Err...
"Merkin"? Do you really have to? If it were any other people it wouldn't be acceptable to give them an insulting nickname.
And as for Americans hating gays (don't use the F word) that's a gross over generalisation based on a few shouty bigots. The vast majority of all Americans I've ever met do not have a problem with people being gay.
Not 'Merkins'
if you want to be politically correct, please use the term 'septics' instead.
For accuracy
Try Radio 4's Hut 33.
OK, maybe not that accurate but at least it is funny.
You forgot
They will also show him foiling a Nazi suicide bomb attack, a high speed car chase with several explosions, with Leo handling a variety of semi automatic weapons, solving Femat's Theorem whilst waiting to tell a greatful Winston Churchill that he should pass control of the House of Commons over to the US Congress.
Will they even try to get him to talk with a British accent? Or will they suggest that he has spent many years working in the States
So..
What kind or robot will the enigma machine transform into?
Is Michael Bay directing it?
When they finally crack the code there could be an almighty explosion which lasts 30 minutes and no one in the audience would have the remotest idea what's going on and afterwards they'd leave the cinema with tinnitus but it'd be great anyway.
"Tortured Genius"
It comes with the territory.
Haven't you noticed that stupid people are happier than you?
Beer, getting people stupid enough to be happy since 9500 BCE.
I don't suppose we can complain...
"Apparently in this new film Turing meets an attractive young woman while he is at MIT working on cracking the Enigma codes. After they marry the two go on to live a long and fulfilling life, probably with Turing single-handedly foiling a number of unlikely soviet schemes"
....when the film reveals that Turing did not really die, but his suicide was a faked cover to bring him over to the US for a big operation against the Commies. After all, we did the same thing to Mallory in 'The guns of Navarone'....
On a positive note ...
casting suggestions in no particular order...
Gary Oldman
Benedict Cumberbach
Hugh Laurie
Cumberbatch ...
In fact would be ideal for Turing. The other-worldliness quotient is perfect.
But I thought ...
that Leonardo DiCaprio died in Titanic.
I'm sure he did. I watched it eight times just to make sure.
Leo dies again
Sadly the ending to this movie is even worse than Titanic.
Thank goodness we now live in more enlightened times (some of us at least).
If only we could go back in time...
... and make an vintage British movie set in Bletchley Park. Obviously Dirk Bogarde is Alan Turing.
"Hollywood has a poor record in bringing stories about the wartime exploits of Britain's cryptographers to screen."
Why care about the personnel of a large aircraft carrier?
The Title?
He will hack the German's computer (passwd is HITLER) and cause it to self destruct in a large explosion then escape in a high speed chase through London in a mini to rescue the babe.
Don't be silly, they wouldn't have such an easy password, they would make it really hard to guess and go for H1TL3R obviously ;)
while uttering the imortal line...
'Oh noh, it's encrypted... this will take a few minutes more'
Nah, it could be better
I'm thinking big-screen terminals, with big flashing "ACCESS DENIED" while Turing hammers away faster and faster at the keyboard until he (being a genius) figures out how to hack umlauts into the mainframe or something.
I'm pretty sure we all agree it's likely to be bad.
3D
I've always thought that you really want to make codebreaking exciting, you just film the formulae in 3D.
Ironically...
... one of the things that helped Bletchley Park crack Enigma was when the Germans used three letter codes to initialise the rotor positions and often used HIT which was followed by, of course, LER for the encrypted message setting!
Funny you should say that... When selecting their random six letter startup message key each day, some Enigma operators would regularly choose H I T L E R, thus making the code breakers' work considerably easier.
@Dodgy Geezer
Oh my god, the Guns of Navarone film. Now there was a turkey. Take the best character-driven thriller ever written, put Gregory Peck in the lead role, and how could you possibly go wrong? Answer: by comprehensively butchering the plot until there's almost nothing left of what made the book great. Oh, and by casting David Niven, whose lack of acting ability makes Orlando Bloom look like Laurence Olivier.
'Enigma', the film...
... was a film of the novel, and was therefore a work of fiction. If you watched it thinking it's an inaccurate documentary, then you're a plonker.
all this Turing stuff ....
is ignoring Tommy Flowers who was instrumental in building the code cracking computers at Bletchley Park.
He spent his own cash doing it , and just about got repaid by a not that appreciative government post war.
When is he going to get due recognition and a film ?
Turing has a ring road named after him around Manchester.
What about naming the M25 or North Circular after Tommy his-most-excellent-engineer Flowers ? Or maybe stick a monument on the 4th pedestal at Trafalgar Square. ( for Flowers that is ) , it would sure beat the rubbish they've had on it so far.
a ring road, is that all?
one might call it a mere token ring... road.
igmc
Er, no
Tommy Flowers provided Colossus to crack Fish.
Polish bombes were used on Enigma, helped by Turing's analysis.
And Turing didn't work on Fish.
He also built...
ERNIE, and the first transistorised pulse-width modulated and time-multiplexed telephone exchanges. He is one of the unsung founders of the modern world
Engineers are not really regarded as professionals in the UK - which is probably why nobody cares about Tommy Flowers and why I have been working on Germany for the last decade.
err yes ... :)
I thought Tommy Flowers Colossi computers were installed at Bletchley ? Guessing he did a fair amount of his work at Dollis Hill.
The point still stands , when are we going to have a film about Tommy Flowers ? When is the M25 going to be named Tommy Flowers way ? Mind you Mr Flowers machine worked and were much better than what preceded, the M25 has been shagged and under specified since the day it was opened, so maybe naming the M25 after him wouldn't be so complementary.
Tommy Flowers didn't write about the Decision Problem though.
Tommy Flowers
There was a short thing on BBC2 recently, I think it was one of those James May things.
unfortunately you are quite correct
which is why I suppose German Cars are so good ( which is more than I can say about the average driver of said German Cars here in the UK, although in Germany from my limited experience the drivers seemed well behaved )
Turing test
I guess the important question is, would Leonardo DiCaprio pass the Turing test?
"The ink has already dried on Warners' script deal, but speculation on who might play Turing in a biopic has already begun, coders' mag i-programmer reports."
I always thought the saying was "The ink has barely dried...."
Coincidence.....
And just recently they started revamping the exterior of The Colonnade Hotel London, 2 Warrington Crescent, Little Venice, London W9 1ER, UK, where he was born.
DiCaprio....
Has matured into a pretty good actor, I don't think the Yanks will be that interested as they already think the US of A stole a U-boat capturing the Enigma machine and invented and built the computer Colossus which in fact was built by a postal worker in bletchley, and so won the war.
A film about a gay limey with an American accent won't break box office records and will struggle to get a release over there. The film Enigma was bad enough.
"Turing's wartime achievements in cracking Enigma and other German wartime ciphers failed to count in his favour after he was criminally prosecuted for being homosexual, and forced to undergo humiliating chemical castration and psychiatric treatment before he eventually committed suicide."
Gotta love the decidedly British tall-poppy syndrome. Head's above the parapet? Lop the f*cker off.
Uh, outright vicious homophobia is not the same as "tall poppy syndrome", nor was it reserved for the English in that era. Heard of the McCarthy witch hunts in the US?
Uh, and would he have been so harshly dealt with if he wasn't so prominently in the public eye? I doubt it.
I can't help wondering if...
Stephenson's 'Cryptonomicon' might not make a more, um, palatable film?
I mean, if you're going to bugger around with reality, you may as well do it competently.
Hut33 - the movie
That would be worth watching:
Christopher Ecclestone as Archie
David Mitchell as Gordon
Benedict Cumberbatch as Charles
Milla Jovovich as minka
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