Watch Benedict Cumberbatch Outsmart the Nazis in 'The Imitation Game' Trailer
Can a numbers man take down Nazi Germany? That’s question posed by The Imitation Game, a biopic of British mathematician Alan Turing (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) as he and the other code crackers at England’s famed Bletchley Park rush to break the Nazi’s impenetrable Enigma codes during the darkest days of World War II.
The new U.K. trailer above fills in more of the movie’s plot than we got in the previous teaser, giving us a fuller picture of Turing’s towering talent and matching self-regard (“Alan Turing, one of the of best mathematicians in the world,” is his version of a charming introduction.) We also get more scenes of Keira Knightley’s cryptoanalyst, who’s no slouch herself in the code-cracking department.
More importantly, we get a greater sense of the drama the real-life Turing would face after the war: The man who was later regarded as the father of computer science was prosecuted for homosexuality in 1952 and committed suicide in 1954 at the age of 41. (He wasn’t pardoned by the British government until last year.) “The irony and sickness of it was extraordinary!” Cumberbatch recently told Time Out London. “He wasn’t shouting from the rooftops or trying to start a cause, he was just a man who was gay. He’s such a quiet hero.”
The real Alan Turing
At first glance, The Imitation Game (which hits theaters on Nov. 21) bears a faint resemblance to another November biopic about a troubled British genius forced to overcome great odds, The Theory of Everything. In Theory's case, it's about cosmologist Stephen Hawking (played by Eddie Redmayne), who was stricken with a degenerative nerve disease in his youth. (In a funny bit of biopic round-robin, Cumberbatch actually played Hawking before in a 2004 British TV movie.) How will the two sweeping, awards-season-friendly, historical dramas compare? We’ll know soon enough: The Theory of Everything hits theaters on Nov. 7, and The Imitation Game follows soon after on Nov. 21.
