There is no president of the Internet (yet … ), but if that position existed, Benedict Cumberbatch would likely be its chosen elected representative. The man is utterly beloved on Tumblr, and if you knock one of his movies or performances, be prepared for his swooning, insanely protective online followers – nicknamed, I kid you not, Cumberb*tches – to pull out their best Liam Neeson impressions. They will find you. And they will hurt you. It must be the name. Or the liquid velvet sex voice. Yeah, it’s probably the voice. 

It certainly isn’t any of his on-screen roles, which – from BBC’s "Sherlock" to Khan to Julian Assange – is a parade of sexless, prickly geniuses, many of which hint at landing somewhere on the spectrum. Thanks to "The Imitation Game," you can add another mentally sharp but socially challenged fellow to that resume: behind-the-scenes World War II hero Alan Turing, a man with a tragic, compelling story made even more so by Cumberbatch’s dedicated oddness. 

It only seems fitting the Internet's most beloved actor plays the computer forerunner Turing, a brilliant prodigious mathematician hired onto a secret British crew working to decode Enigma, the German’s impenetrable encryption device. The war, as one of Cumberbatch’s superiors notes, "we’re not winning it," but decrypting the Nazis’ garbled messages could be exactly the leg-up the Allies need to win. The only problem? Enigma is exactly that: an impossibly designed puzzle, one that requires going through billions upon billions of potential solutions. And every night at midnight, the Germans reset the machine, rendering all of the day’s work useless.

While the rest of the team (led by Matthew Goode) goes about traditional methods of attempting to crack the code, Turing has a new plan. Why not battle a brilliant machine with another brilliant machine, not simply men only capable of working at the speed of mortals? He begins designing and building a giant programmable decoding device, a giant wall of spinning wheels and letter combinations. As the end credits obviously point out, it’s essentially the first computer.

The building process, however, is just as slow going. The machine requires expensive parts, and even when assembled, it’s not sure what it’s looking for. To make matters more difficult, Turing isn’t particularly adept at getting his fellow team members or superiors (Mark Strong and Tywin Lannister himself Charles Dance) on board. His literal mind – hinted throughout the film at being on the spectrum – turns every interaction into a test, and he has a confidence about his own intelligence and ideas that comes off as smug and disdainful of anyone else, especially after he fires several team members, "average codebreakers" who he argues will only slow him down.

With the help of Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), one of the team’s talented new recruits, Alan learns to work with the rest of his codebreakers. However, he still relates more to his machine – a cold code-breaking device – than to his fellow man. Machines are logical, straight-forward and easily programmed; humans, on the other hand, can be messy, communicating layers of contextual, social and emotional clues.

After all, in Turing’s mind, there’s not as much difference between the two as most think. Both are puzzle-solving creations, decoding messages to interact with and make sense of the world around them. In a childhood flashback, he gets bullies to stop cruelly picking on him by figuring out that violence without a response is empty, behavior pared down to merely another code to be cracked.

Cumberbatch surrounded by a strong supporting cast, with Goode playing the team’s caddish leader and Knightley as Turing’s closest friend, a person fighting her own set of social codes – namely the societal ones restricting women.

"The Imitation Game," however, is his movie, and he owns it. The actor transforms his signature deep voice into something nasal and awkward. In regular conversation, he often sounds as though he might sneeze at any moment, and he commonly stumbles and stutters his way through interactions – that is, when he's not making them uncomfortable with swift dismissals and literal comments. 

Yet Cumberbatch is still a commanding presence, magnetic even when his character is polarizing to everyone around him. Most impressively, he manages to find the emotional inner workings of man whose own emotions seem to elude him, driven by logic – for better or worse – rather than feelings. As written by screenwriter Graham Moore, Turing was a complicated, odd man, and Cumberbatch delivers a performance both distant and human.

Overall, Moore’s script falls in line with recent Brit biopic material like "The King’s Speech," less stiff import than one might expect and more slyly funny and sharp. The opening interview between Turing and Dance’s commanding officer, for instance, is a fun bit of banter, the two moving sharp retorts and literal wordplay like pawns on a chess board.

Director Morten Tyldum keeps things moving as well with a nice Brit spy thriller pulse – if clumsily. While the script is sharp, the storytelling is less so, clunkily bouncing between eras in flashback and using some remarkably needless voiceover. At one point, Turing chimes in to tell the audience how many possible options the team must go through, a fact said in a line of dialogue mere moments ago.

The film also opens with a "Prestige"-like warning to pay close attention, hinting at a twisty, deceptive movie that the conventionally hewed "The Imitation Game" most certainly is not. Then again, considering the movie closes with the note that the computing device is now commonly known as a computer, the movie may just overall not think too highly of the audience's attention spans and intelligence.

Even with one's attention finely tuned, what you may miss is oddly enough a sense of the stakes. While Alexandre Desplat’s score brings some needed intensity, the script doesn’t really convey a feel for what's at risk here. The war is mostly out of sight, and the lead is a man who emotionally struggles to connect with others. Its best attempts are some out of place "Movietone News"-esque war montages of B-roll that feel like a gigantic "meanwhile ..." on the screen. As a result, when the mission is finally accomplished, the victory is pleasant but hollow. There's little effective build, and what was apparently years feels more like weeks. 

Then again, considering the story, a hollow victory may be the perfect conclusion for "The Imitation Game." It is, after all, a story about people removed from the actual war going on, essentially playing games (they recruit new codebreakers using crosswords, and the team's leader is a chess champion). And while the machine eventually worked, it came with a price, forcing its inventors to coldly and calculatedly play god from a distance. It’s a happy ending, but with an asterisk.

Turing’s ending comes with an even bigger asterisk, his machine a revolutionary device that ended a war and saved lives. His reward from his country's government, however, was to eventually be chemically castrated to the point of suicide for being a homosexual. His is a great triumph ruined by a greater tragedy. So perhaps an emotionally distanced film is exactly fitting for a story about a man coldly distanced from others, the war, himself and sadly the country he helped save.