At first I gave it an 8, then I moved it down to 4 when I found out how historically inaccurate it is.
I know many people differ from me, but I am opposed to taking "artistic license" when they're simultaneously presenting the movie as based on a true story. Alan Turing's life is interesting enough not to have to resort to making things up.
The following are, in my opinion, some of the more egregious inaccuracies (taken from Wikipedia):
Naming the Enigma-breaking machine "Christopher" after Turing's childhood friend and suggesting that Turing was the only cryptographer working on it with others not helping or opposed. In actuality, this electromechanical machine was called 'Victory' and it was a collaborative, not individual, effort. It was a British Bombe machine, which was partly inspired by a design by the Polish cryptanalyst Marian Rejewski. Rejewski designed a machine in 1938 called bomba kryptologiczna which exploited a weakness in German operating procedures that was corrected in 1940. A new machine with a different strategy was designed by Turing (with a key contribution from mathematician Gordon Welchman, unmentioned in the film) in 1940. More than 200 British Bombes were built under the supervision of Harold Keen of the British Tabulating Machine Company.
Showing a scene where the Hut 8 team decides not to use broken codes to stop a German raid on a convoy that the brother of one of the code breakers (Peter Hilton) is serving on, in order to hide the fact they have broken the code. In reality, Hilton had no such brother, and decisions about when and whether to use data from Ultra intelligence were made at much higher administrative levels.
The depiction of the recruitment of Joan Clarke as a result of an examination after solving a crossword puzzle in a newspaper. In reality Joan Clarke was recruited by her former academic supervisor, Gordon Welchman, to the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS)
Exaggerating Turing's social difficulties to the point of depicting him having Asperger syndrome or otherwise being on the autism spectrum. While a few writers and researchers have tried to assign such a retrospective diagnosis to Turing,[106] and it is true that he had his share of eccentricities, the Asperger's-like traits portrayed in the film – an intellectual snob with no friends, no sense of how to work cooperatively with others, and no understanding of humour – bear little relationship to the actual adult Turing, who had friends, was viewed as having a sense of humour, and had good working relationships with his colleagues.
Scenes about Turing's childhood friend, including the manner in which Turing learned of Morcom's illness and death.
Suggesting that the chemical castration that Turing was forced to undergo made him unable to think clearly or do any work. Despite physical weakness and changes in Turing's body including gynecomastia, at that time he was doing innovative work on mathematical biology, inspired by the very changes his body was undergoing due to chemical castration.
Stating outright that Turing committed suicide after a year of hormone treatment. In reality, the nature of Turing's death is a matter of considerable debate. The chemical castration period ended fourteen months before his death. The official inquest into his death ruled that he had committed suicide by consuming a cyanide-laced apple. Turing biographer Andrew Hodges believes the death was indeed a suicide, re-enacting the poisoned apple from Snow White, Turing's favourite fairy tale, with some deliberate ambiguity included to permit Turing's mother to interpret it as an accident. However Jack Copeland, an editor of volumes of Turing's work and Director of the Turing Archive for the History of Computing, has suggested that Turing's death may have been accidental, caused by the cyanide fumes produced by an experiment in his spare room, and that the coroner's investigation was poorly conducted.
Showing Turing interacting with Stewart Menzies, head of the British Secret Intelligence Service. There are no records showing they interacted at all during Turing's time at Bletchley Park.
Including an espionage subplot involving Turing working with John Cairncross. Turing and Cairncross worked in different areas of Bletchley Park and there is no evidence they ever met.[88][89] Historian Von Tunzelmann was angered by this subplot (which suggests that Turing was for a while blackmailed into not revealing Cairncross as a spy lest his homosexuality be revealed), writing that "Creative licence is one thing, but slandering a great man's reputation – while buying into the nasty 1950s prejudice that gay men automatically constituted a security risk – is quite another."
