10 Best Movie Screenplays Since 2010

Graham Moore - Biopic/War

Finishing Number One on 2011's Black List, this biopic follows Alan Turing, the brilliant yet haunted English mathematician who became instrumental in cracking the Enigma machine at Bletchley Park during WW2. The script ( rather than the final film version) had it all. An amazing lead character who was dealing with profound emotional issues, (struggling with his sexuality at a time where homosexuality was truly demonized), colossal stakes (the outcome of the greatest war humanity has known) and fantastic urgency (crack the Enigma machine or lose vital Allied shipping and with it, thousands of lives).

Throw in the fact that Turing is testing to work with to say the least and you have layers of relationship conflict which threatens to boil over throughout the story.

It is a story of ego and personal identity as much as it is of the collective war effort. There is one truly fantastic scene; they have finally cracked the elusive codes yet are now faced with an even greater dilemma, if they act and save an Allied ship from a U-Boat the Germans will now know they have cracked the code, and could reset the machine in response, yet if they don't act the Allied ship will be scuttled and with it, so many lives (not the least a family relation of one of Turing's own colleagues.)

The Imitation Game manages to breathe life into what could have been a dry story about code-breaking by wrapping the narrative around a persona every bit as complex as the German cryptology. Biopics centred around cerebral figures often suffer by their inherent undramatic nature-the real magic is always happening in the mind.

Yet Graham Moore avoids this pitfall by layering the story through a fine balancing act, juggling three different storylines simultaneously-the cracking of Enigma, which is the main storyline, the 'future' Turing in 1951, where we see how the hero has fallen from grace, sprawled out in his messy flat with a policeman at the door, and the 'young' Alan, where his nascent homosexuality is being explored in the stuffy confines of his grammar school.

The best biopics (so often boring) are those that get to the heart of character, and The Imitation Game's script succeeded in this.