The Imitation Game · written by Graham Moore · 2014

The exhausted team says it needs to know what the message will say; Turing asks how they could know, and John points out that known plaintext would make decrypting it unnecessary.

Scene 83 of 130 · ≈ 1 min on screen · Act two

John Cairncross
Peter Hilton
Hugh Alexander
Alan Turing

Act oneAct twoAct three

Begins 1:16 into a 1:57 film

The story so farBefore scene 83

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.
Scenes 13–30
He sees the scale of Enigma, believes a machine can solve it, and grows isolated from colleagues who make little progress.
Scenes 31–50
Churchill’s order gives Turing authority and his half-built machine advances toward sustained work.
Just before
Scene 80
Christopher never arrives; Alan’s hope collapses and the bullies who previously attacked him surround him again.
Scene 81
Nock asks whether machines can think; Turing explains that different thinking does not make a machine mindless, then invites Nock to question him about the war.
Scene 82
After another failed midnight run, the team abandons the attempt and walks outside, frustrated that they still lack a solution.
Scene 83
This scene

83EXT. BLETCHLEY PARK - NEAR HUT 11 - CONTINUOUS

The team walks across Bletchley together, moving as one through the most highly secret war zone in the world.

MORE SECURITY has been added throughout the park, including along the path from Hut 11 — ARMED GUARDS check IDs, which the team hands over absentmindedly.

JOHN CAIRNCROSS

We’re soon out of time. Our

month...

PETER HILTON

So that’s it then. We lost.

HUGH ALEXANDER

It does not matter how much we

improve on it, that machine will

never be able to check 159 million

million million possibilities in

time.

ALAN TURING

It’s searching... It’s just... It

doesn’t know what it’s searching

for... If only we knew what the

messages were going to say...

JOHN CAIRNCROSS

If we knew what the messages were

going to say, we wouldn’t have to

decrypt them at all.

ON ALAN: Maybe it was always impossible after all.