LastingAware
The greatest movie ever!
GetPapa
Far from Perfect, Far from Terrible
Lancoor
A very feeble attempt at affirmatie action
Ortiz
Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.
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German military messages enciphered on the Enigma machine were first broken by the Polish Cipher Bureau, beginning in December 1932. This success was a result of efforts by three Polish cryptologist's, Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski, working for Polish military intelligence. Rejewski reverse-engineered the device, using theoretical mathematics and material supplied by French military intelligence. Subsequently the three mathematicians designed mechanical devices for breaking Enigma ciphers, including the cryptologic bomb. From 1938 onwards, additional complexity was repeatedly added to the Enigma machines, making decryption more difficult and requiring further equipment and personnel—more than the Poles could readily produce.On 26 and 27 July 1939,[3] in Pyry near Warsaw, the Poles initiated French and British military intelligence representatives into their Enigma-decryption techniques and equipment, including Zygalski sheets and the cryptologic bomb, and promised each delegation a Polish-reconstructed Enigma. The demonstration represented a vital basis for the later British continuation and effort.[4] During the war, British cryptologists decrypted a vast number of messages enciphered on Enigma. The intelligence gleaned from this source, codenamed "Ultra" by the British, was a substantial aid to the Allied war effort.Marian Rejewski was responsible for the initial analysis that enabled exploitation of the German ENIGMA cryptographic machine. Without his breakthroughs, which he provided to the French and British in 1939, the U.K. and U.S. may have never been able to exploit ENIGMA. Mr. Rejewski's genius was that he recognized traditional attacks as useless against ENIGMA. He became the first to employ a higher-algebraic attack against any cryptographic system. His insight produced a solution that had evaded his French and British peers for a decade, and thanks to his contributions, ENIGMA-derived intelligence enabled U.S. and British efforts to defeat Germany.
SnoopyStyle
Thomas Jericho (Dougray Scott) is brought back to Bletchley Park to decrypt the new version of the Enigma machine specially made for U-boats. He's been away after a mental breakdown. There is a large convoy coming across the Atlantic and the Allies are newly blind. There is a suspected spy as the Nazis seems to be changing their ways. Tom is searching for his missing girlfriend Claire Romilly (Saffron Burrows) along with her flatmate Hester Wallace (Kate Winslet). Meanwhile Wigram (Jeremy Northam) is searching for the mole.Dougray Scott gives a tiresome performance especially at the beginning when his character is world weary. Kate Winslet is playing a mousy character. All the flashbacks are pretty boring. Saffron Burrows is doing supermodel level of acting. Their great love never seem so great. The movie is a bore when this should be a thrilling spy story. In the end, I don't care about Jericho. That would be workable if Jericho actually turns out to be the mole. That would be quite a nice noir touch. Also the act of code breaking is not done that well. Although doing code breaking well has never been easy.
runamokprods
Enjoyable, smart WWII thriller about code breaking, based on a true story, and notable for being a war film more about human intelligence then daring action. The script by Tom Stoppard is strong. It's very good film, but some irritating flaws keep it from being great. With the exception of Kate Winslet, a lot of the acting is over the top. Also, the film wimps out on the true story, and misses some fascinating complexity, since in real life the lead character was gay, at a time where that alone was enough to win everyone's distrust. Further, the whole style of the film feels old-fashioned in a way that goes back and forth between charming and forced. Last, at least the US version is a really bad DVD transfer. Lots of soft spots, etc. And yet, I'd still urge people to see it.
James Hitchcock
The British cinema produced so many war films in the forties, fifties and sixties that one might have thought that the supply of suitable subjects would have dried up, and indeed such films have, since around 1970, not been as popular as they once were. Film-makers do, however, occasionally succeed in finding new wartime subjects, and "Enigma" is one such example. It is a fictitious account of the work of the British code-breakers based at Bletchley Park. The story is set in March 1943 when the Battle of the Atlantic was at its height and the key priority for the code-breakers was to crack the "shark" cipher used by the German Navy to communicate with its U-Boats. (The title derives from the Enigma machines used by the Nazis to encode messages).The main character is cryptanalyst Tom Jericho, a brilliant but eccentric Cambridge mathematician loosely based on Alan Turing. As the film opens, Jericho is returning to Bletchley Park after recovering from a nervous breakdown caused by overwork and an unhappy love affair. Jericho's former lover Claire has mysteriously gone missing, and he enlists the help of her housemate Hester to try and track her down. In the course of their search they discover that she was responsible for the theft of classified documents and begin to suspect that she might have been working for the Germans.The film has been criticised on two counts. One is that it does not mention Turing's vital work in cracking the code, replacing him with the fictional Jericho. This may have been down to financial considerations; Turing was gay whereas Jericho is heterosexual, and the filmmakers may have felt that a film with a gay hero would not do well at the box-office. On the other hand, they may simply have wanted to remain faithful to Robert Harris' source novel. The other commonly voiced criticism was of the storyline in which the real traitor turns out to be a Pole who is betraying Allied military secrets to the Nazis because of anger over the Katyn massacre in which his brother died. This also struck me as an unlikely development; the German occupation of Poland was so brutal that no Pole, however great his resentment of Stalin, would have been likely to have collaborated with the Nazis. In actual fact, there were no known German agents working at Bletchley Park; the only spy there was the notorious John Cairncross, one of the Cambridge spy ring, who was working for the Soviet Union, not Germany.Dougray Scott is good as Jericho, a seedy, slightly unbalanced genius, and Jeremy Northam is also good as the suave but sinister upper-class MI5 agent Wigram. This is not, however, really one of Kate Winslet's better films, and she seems miscast as the plain, dowdy bluestocking Hester. She may have taken the role under the influence of the belief, common in the early 2000s, that a physically attractive actress will not be taken seriously in her profession unless she has made at least one film in which she plays a physically unattractive character. (See also Charlize Theron in "Monster" or Nicole Kidman in "The Hours").The plot, as is usual with spy thrillers, is a highly complex one, and at times difficult to follow. Tom Stoppard, who wrote the screenplay, may be one of Britain's greatest playwrights, but I find that his talents often work better in the theatre than in the cinema. "Enigma" does, however, succeed in conveying a good sense of the atmosphere of wartime Britain, a mixture of fear, paranoia about the enemy and patriotic enthusiasm. 6/10