"Sometimes, it’s the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine." Picture, if you will, a screenwriter laboring away in a Hollywood loft, tasked with adapting the tumultuous life story of Alan Turing into the kind of inspirational fodder that wins Oscars. Because underdog stories often lead to simplistic, triumphant catharsis, this screenwriter is supposed to emphasize how Turing—humorless, antisocial, distrustful, and (no small matter in 1940s London) homosexual—won World War II for England seemingly singlehandedly by developing a complex computer that could decode Germany’s Enigma encryption device. So our harried screenwriter (in this case Graham Moore) latches on to maudlin lines of dialogue that crudely point out the unlikely historical significance of the film’s central plucky iconoclast, most notably the quotation cited above.
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