Enigma by Michael Apted (Review)

After the mindless waste of time that was Black Mask 2, I wanted to watching something intelligent and stimulating, and Enigma more than fit the bill. Set during the height of World War 2, Enigma trails Tom Jericho, a brilliant mathematician who was instrumental in cracking the secret German military codes. That is, until he underwent a breakdown related to a woman he was seeing at the time. When the Germans suddenly change their codes, rendering the Allies’ attempts futile, Jericho is brought back and put to work. Complicating matters is the recent disappearance of Claire, his former lover, under rather suspicious circumstances.

With the help of her bookish roommate Hester, Jericho tracks down her final whereabouts while trying to crack the new German codes, all while a greater conspiracy hangs in the background.

Enigma is consistently engaging, with enough twists and turns to make you wonder if this isn’t all in Jericho’s head. Dougray Scott, who plays Jericho, is especially convincing as a man who may be a genius, but is so unhinged he could very well be a threat to national security. Adding color to the film is Jeremy Northam as a slimy British agent trying to figure out the mysteries surrounding Jericho, as well as a colorful cast of codebreakers and military officials.

As if to remind you of the stakes of Jericho’s personal and professional quests, Enigma will sometimes shift its focus away from Bletchley Park (home of Britain’s codebreakers) and look at the bigger picture. We see the important role these codebreakers play in the Allies’ battles, as well as the sacrifices their efforts unfortunately demanded.

One powerful sequence intercuts scenes of the codebreakers’ efforts with scenes of German submarines hunting down an Allied convoy. The codebreakers need to let the Germans follow the convoy, so as to gather the German transmissions to aid in their efforts. However, this prevents them from warning the convoy, sealing their fate.

Director Michael Apsted (The World Is Not Enough) does a fine job of balancing the various directions the film takes. He even manages to weave in a growing romance between Jericho and Hester without dumbing down the film at all. And for military geeks out there, there are the nitty gritty technical aspects of the film, which are also handled quite well. The German codes were an amazing invention, and the codebreaker’s efforts were a Herculean task.

Even if you didn’t take Professor Maslowski’s military history classes in college, or faithfully watch the History Channel, enough is explained to truly make you appreciate the daunting nature of WW2 codebreaking. This is before supercomputers did their crunching, when codebreaking involved hours of sifting through countless transmissions looking for keys to unlock the code.

With its romantic aspects, Enigma may take a fairly dramatized approach to the subject matter. But thankfully, it’s also a very smart and intriguing one as well. I can’t speak to its historical accuracy — I’m sure some liberties were taken — but as far as mysteries and puzzles go, it’s topnotch.