Enigma DVD > Reviews > BREAK THE CODE OR GO INSANE TRYING

Author's product rating:   

Did you enjoy it?	Loved it
Story	Outstanding
Characters / Performances	Good
Special Effects	Outstanding
How does it compare to similar films?	Good

Advantages:	Great plot, good suspense, supreb acting
Disadvantages:	plot is a deep but good all the same

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

A little imagination and some true facts from the past and you have a great book or an excellent film. One author going by the name of Robert Harris done this and served up an intense book about mental breakdowns, naval convoys, codes, and obsessions in his amazing book, Enigma. After reading the book when it was first released many years back, I hoped it would be turned into a movie, and I was not dissappointed. Just like the book, the movie was intense and great. (I'll try not to reveal too much for those people who haven't yet seen the movie)

For those of you people who like plenty of plot, this movie is packed with it and a little suspense, and informative behind the scenes action that helped us win the war. It was directed Micheal Apted and screenwriter of Shakespeare in Love, Tom Stoppard, handled the story, and what a story it was.

One of the main tasks during World War II was the cracking of the German codes that were used to transmit messages between their troops. The Germans had come up with the ingenious invention of a machine called the Enigma , hence the name of the book/movie, that encodes the messages differently each and every time. It was thought to be unbreakable by any standards, but once the Allies salvaged an Enigma machine, the race was on to crack the riddle of the Enigma to save the convoys of ships from the undectable U-boats.

The first person to master the Enigma is the mathematician Tom Jericho (dougray Scott), who goes back to Bletchly to continue his work on the codes after his mental breakdown triggered by getting dumped by his girlfriend, the lovely Claire Romilly (Saffron Burrows), who is a very mysterious person in the movie. Tom's the only one who has ever broken one of the codes, and the codebreakers need him back desperately. Later on, the Germans switch their original code, and now he needs to crack it all over again but it isn't as easy as it sounds. He has to do the work that took ten months in four days and failure is not an option as the results will we catastrophic. Will he be able to do it?

During all this, Claire dissappears, leaving Tom determined to find her again. But Claire's mysterious ways arises suspicions on her being a tratior, or did she get mixed up with the wrong thing by accident? Is there a spy in the codebreakers HQ causing the Germans to change the code? That's what the chief Wigram (Jeremy Northam) is going to find out. His character is oily and too knowledgeable for his own good. Will he discover the truth?

Then there's Claire's roomate, Hester Wallace (the beuatiful Kate Winslet), with her pretty looks and thick black glasses. She's attatched to her roomate, and even she is affected by Claire's mysterious attitude making her wonder what the real truth is and Tom is an unlikley allt. They get close and intimate but is Tom actually attracted to her or is it just a ploy to find Claire?

THere is no shortage of riddles in this thick plot for the reader to ponder over. The flashbacks to the future to the present from somewhere in the Eastern front to the convoy crossing the ocean makes you think that this will cause great confusion, but oddly enough, this has been executed so well that it is not as bad as you think it would be. There is a great possibility that the start of the film will confuse the pants off you as the various plots of the story are introduced, but slowly but surely they gradually come together to make a consistent and hugely entertaining thriller in the end.

Jeremy Northam is rather different here, playing the role of the slick and pretty nasty Wigram, who's ruthless when he has to be (and sometimes when he doesn't have to be), willing to sacrifice lives to get the results that are desired.

Saffron Burrows is a cool, rather detached Claire, working her way through the alphabet of men for reasons of her own.

In my opinion, the best character was Hester. Not because she is Kate Winslet, but because she is practical, knowing her own limitations, and more than a match for any man.

An amazing score, which is used to its full potential throughout. Costumes and atmosphere is almost to a T in the setting of the British countryside in the Second World War, with everyone looking slightly ragged and a mild touch of shabbiness to everything. An excellent move for just about everyone, but there is a brief bit of sex, nudity, and 'colourful' language so it might not be good for children (but the plot is pretty complex so they probably won't like it).