On E List of Movie Reviews
(For optimum viewing, adjust the zoom level of your browser to 125%.)
Enigma (2001)
Rate:
1
Viewed:
3/25
3/25:
"IT'S A BRILLIANT FILM!"
No, Enigma is not. It's one of the worst movies ever made. I didn't understand anything the characters
said. Let's try the following for illustrative purposes: "One group of letters for the convoy sighted, two groups
for grid reference, one group for course, one group for speed. Five groups of letters per contact signal every
two hours. Shadowing the convoy for maybe 10 hours, 12... that's 25 groups of letters." Whatever...
Prior to starting the film, I thought it would be about Alan Turing the famous English mathematician. To achieve
the series of breakthroughs that turned the tide of WWII, he improved upon the codebreaking work of Polish
mathematicians (Marian Rejwski, Jerzy Rózycki, and Henryk Zygalski) which began in 1933. For reference, the
UK Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park was founded in August 1939 because Poland had
been invaded by Germany a year earlier and the cryptanalysis work, which grew too sophisticated at this
point, needed to be carried out somewhere else.
The biggest break was the capture of new codebooks from a sinking U-boat on October 30, 1942. Months afterwards,
nearly every message sent out by Germany had been successfully encrypted. All of the work done to break
the Enigma Code was primarily responsible in advancing modern computing and laying the foundation of computer
science, and Alan Turing had a lot to do with that. In the film, you see the shelves of hundreds of rotating
drums? First invented by the Polish, they're called "bombes" which were created for greater efficiency by Alan
Turing (Gordon Welchman later made improvements). The goal was to speed up the process of cracking the Enigma
Code given that there were more than 15 million million million possible combinations to wade through.
Hence, forget everything in Enigma; it's fictional, and there's no real-life connection between
the codebreaking work and the Katyn massacre. Once upon a time, I laughed at Dougray Scott's ridiculous acting in
Mission: Impossible II, and here, he does it again. At the same
time, how can I take Kate Winslet seriously when she has those "fuck me" Harry Potter glasses on? Nobody dressed
elegantly or had it pretty in England during wartime. Please, get out of here.
All in all, Enigma does history grave injustice by skipping the works of true Enigma codebreakers,
most especially Alan Turing.