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Film Club w/c 4 Apr 2025 - Enigma (2001 film)

Lotus

Well, my first week of my new film club was a flop - nobody did a review of Big Trouble in Little China apart from me, so I guess nobody fancied watching it.

I'm trying again - this week's film is Enigma (2001) I've always been fascinated by what went on in Bletchley park during WW2.

If you are interested in this film, it's available to watch for free on ITVX. If you watch it, please post a review here.

Parents

  • A reminder of this week's film, if you want to watch it.

    I watched it at the weekend and found it very interesting. It made me research the Enigma machine and how they decrypted the messages. 

    If you don't know, the messages were encrypted using a substitution cypher (substituting one letter for another) Trying to put it as simply as possible, the Enigma machine changed each letter entered so if the operator entered the word  "SUPPORT" the machine might create "VXSSRUW" to replace that word in the encrypted message. So to decrypt the message, all the V's had to be changed to S, all the X's to U, all the S's to P, all the R's to O, all the U's to R, and the W's to T.

    To make it more difficult, the machines were reset daily (the German operators were given a daily code book) To have a chance of deciphering a message, the Allies needed to be able to guess what some of the words might be, for example some messages were weather forecasts and they could guess what some of the words would be in those forecasts and then once they knew some of the substitution letters they could work out other messages. This was called having a crib. 

    In the film they showed a room full of panels with rotating wheels, which looked to me like a prototype computer. I looked it up and this machine was called a Bombe - it helped decipher encrypted messages by allowing multiple Enigma settings to be quickly checked.

    Here's a fun Enigma quiz: Can you decrypt the following encrypted message?

    Here's the crib - the letters follow the same substitution pattern as "SUPPORT" above, and it is about the NAS:

    WKH QDV VXSSRUWV  DXWLVWLF SHRSOH

  • in reply to Lotus

    Thank you. 

    Very interesting. 

    I have read the book.

    Lotus said:
    In the film they showed a room full of panels with rotating wheels, which looked to me like a prototype computer.

    Turing developed the computer before computers.

    https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/lovelace-turing-and-invention-computers

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