Imitation Game is just 41.1% accurate, claims new study

It may have won the screenplay Oscar, but it turns out that ‘The Imitation Game’ is a measly 41.1% accurate.

However, by comparison, the Martin Luther King biopic ‘Selma’ is a whopping 100% accurate.

The figures have been crunched, scene-by-painstaking-scene by the data website Information is Beautiful, comparing the action on screen to what happened in real life.

In all, 14 Oscar-nominated movies based on real events since the turn of the decade have been scrutinised.

“Alan Turing did work as a cryptographer at Bletchley Park during the war and was arrested for homosexuality after the war. That much is true,” said the analysts, of the Benedict Cumberbatch-fronted movie.

“Most of the rest of this film isn’t. To be fair, shoe-horning the incredible complexity of the Enigma machine and cyptography in general was never going to be easy. But this film just rips the historical record to shreds,” said the website’s analysts.”

Then a huge number of scenes are dissected and compared to the actual events, citing sources.

As for Selma, it says: “This movie painstakingly recreates events as they happened, and takes care to include everybody who was involved. Which explains the larger-than-usual-for-Hollywood cast.”

‘The Big Short’ (91.4%), ‘Bridge of Spies’ (89.9%), and ’12 Years A Slave’ (88.1%) also scored highly.

But Clint Eastwood’s biopic about the life of US Navy SEAL marksman Chris Kyle ‘American Sniper’ (56.9%) and the Matthew McConaughey-helmed ‘Dallas Buyer’s Club’ (61.4%) fared rather less well.

“A lot of the events in the movie did happen, but Kyle’s involvement in them was repeatedly exaggerated,” reads the analysis. “His tragic hero status was a Hollywood flourish – by all accounts (including his own) he thrived off his job and it didn’t bother him much.”

As for ‘Dallas Buyer’s Club’, it was a ‘difficult one to analyse as much source-material came from Ron Woodroof’s private diaries. Generally seems like an authentically true-story with liberties taken some of Ron’s actions and the whole Rayon character and subplot being made up’.

Here’s the list of movies and their historical accuracy in full:

‘The Big Short’ – 91.4%
‘Spotlight’ – 81.6%
‘Bridge of Spies’ – 89.9%
‘Selma’ – 100%
‘American Sniper’ – 56.9%
‘The Imitation Game’ – 41.4%
‘The Dallas Buyer’s Club’ – 61.4%
‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ – 74.6%
’12 Years A Slave’ – 88.1%
‘Philomena’ – 69.8%
‘Captain Phillips’ – 81.4%
‘Rush’ – 81.9%
‘The Social Network’ – 76.1%
‘The King’s Speech’ – 73.4%

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