The Imitation Game · written by Graham Moore · 2014

The assistant delivers the message to Hut 8, where four codebreakers work through immense stacks; the team cannot reach the urgent intercept before the settings change.

Scene 28 of 130 · ≈ 1 min on screen · Act one

Alan Turing

Act oneAct twoAct three

Begins 25 min into a 1:57 film

The story so farBefore scene 28

At Bletchley Park, Alan Turing must persuade a skeptical team to build a machine that can break Enigma before the war is lost, while concealing the self the law condemns.

Scenes 1–12
Turing is investigated as a guarded outsider in 1951, then enters Bletchley in 1939 looking for the puzzle he can solve.
Just before
Scene 25
A WREN intercepts the submarine-related message at Bletchley, writes down gibberish, and adds it to the growing pile of encrypted traffic.
Scene 26
An assistant carries the intercept through the crowded Bletchley grounds while Turing describes the immense number of possible Enigma settings.
Scene 27
The assistant passes armed guards and security checkpoints on her way to the cryptanalysis huts.
Scene 28
This scene

28INT. BLETCHLEY PARK - HUT 8 - DAY

— HUT 8: Where the Enigma cryptanalysis team does their work.

ALAN TURING (V.O.)

But if we had 10 men checking one

setting a minute, for 24 hours

every day and seven days every

week, it would take... Well, you

tell me. How many days would it

take to check each of the settings?

— John Cairncross, Peter Hilton, Keith Furman, and Charles Richards use PERFORATED SHEETS to analyze Enigma messages as the Female Assistant deposits the pile onto Hugh Alexander’s desk.

All around Hut 8, we see STACK after STACK of encrypted messages, just like the one that was just delivered.

ALAN TURING (V.O.)

... Would you like a hint? It’s not

days. It’s years.

The team does their best to decrypt these stacks of messages, but they’re getting nowhere. There are thousands of messages, and only four cryptographers.

ALAN TURING (V.O.)

(sighs)

Oh dear, you still haven’t worked

it out, have you? Pity you didn’t

pay more attention in school.

(beat)

It’s 20 million years.

MOVE IN on the urgent message about the attack, which is untouched as —