Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Enigma

This is topic Enigma in forum Film Handlers' Movie Reviews at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Jerry Chase (Member # 660) on 05-30-2002, 02:13 PM:

Ewww. I felt like I stepped into a slimey romance novel that had a thin mystery attached to make it legit.

I suppose if I could have suspended my disbelief enough to think that the security lapses required by the plot were plausable, I might have been more interested in this film. In the middle of WW II an enigma machine can be taken for a joy ride in the country? Yeah, right. I was waiting for the Hogswarts Express to arrive after that.

The shooting of reels one and two sucked. There was no headroom for the actors, and the projectionist had to frame right up to the frame line to get an acceptable composition, exposing the intercutting splices. For the first 30 minutes I felt like I was watching a student film.

IMO, this was a waste of my money and time.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 06-10-2002, 07:19 AM:

I agree. Furthermore, the producers threw away a great opportunity by spending all that time and money on painstaking reconstructions of Turing's bombes (mechanical calculating modules) but not giving us any technical detail about how they worked or the mathematical detail of the cryptology at all.

OK, it's difficult to put much technical or historical detail into a film which is concerned mainly with who Fatty Winslet is going to shag and when (cf. Titanic), but this to me is where all attempts to film Robert Harris' novels have been seriously derailed: here, and especially with Fatherland.

I'm surprised that no-one has tried to film Archangel - this book places far more emphasis on suspense and chase scenes than other Harris novels, and the stuff about Stalin would be easier to work in as flashbacks than the background in either Fatherland or Enigma.