Codebreakers in Love

May 11, 2002

Enigma is a new Michael Apted film about the codebreakers of Bletchley Park, the British thinktank that broke the German encryption code during WWII. It is essentially a WWII espionage thriller, with many of the facts based in true fact. Bletchley Park existed, and the Enigma machines that cranked out the german “Shark” code are all true. What screenwriter Tom Stoppard did was to create a fictional character by the name of Tom Jericho, troubled mathematical genius, and station him in the middle of a fairly familiar tale of love and intrigue. The character of Jericho is loosely based on the C.V. of Alan Turing, who invented the giant thinking machines that helped crack the code in the real world, and is generally considered the father of modern computer science.

The film starts off really slowly and doesn’t get going until Jericho finds a stash of unencoded papers that may lead to the whereabouts of his long lost love. Once Jericho and Esther Wallace (Kate Winslet) start sleuthing around to find answers while avoiding a smarmy intelligence agent played by Jeremy Northam, the film finally gets on the move. When the film is explaining the workings of Bletchley Park, as well as how all the codebreaking efforts affect the war efforts, Enigma is genuinely interesting. While it doesn’t have really interesting characters, much of it seems passable due to solid acting efforts all around. The plot bounces around quite a bit, but I was never invested enough to really buy into the plot twists. The credibility is hurt a bit by the fact that all the detective work is dependent on absolutely horrid security efforts in a Bletchley Park, which is supposedly a top secret, super secure military installation. I’m a sucker for crypto fiction, but this isn’t as strong a work as Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon and is about as entertaining as Sneakers. I’d probably consider it a better film than U-571, since they at least got the basic facts correct (it was the British that recovered a working Enigma machine, not the United States).

While I enjoyed Enigma, those interested in the subject should check out this website from PBS. It’s got a lot of detailed info on the Enigma machines and the codebreaking efforts, as well as some introductory information about cryptography.

Posted in Moving Pictures