Dirty War

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source: Dirty War

I have just watched "Dirty War," and I want to recommend for various reasons. Some of these reasons are out of the skill and talent that were brought together to make an amazing and frightfully realistic piece of film-making. Other reasons are personal, political, and perhaps even philosophical. This is not one for the squeamish. How do I begin? I can only compare my viewing of "Dirty War" to the absolute horror that I experienced the first time I saw "The Day After". Say what you will about Jason Robards, but it was Steve Guttenburg's best performance since "Diner". In "Dirty War" director Daniel Percival has taken material that could have been a simple little B-Movie of the week on nuclear terrorism and turned it into a masterful work. In form, the documentary hand-held camera style, with the well-rounded cast of characters who represent the various levels of the government response are ripped out of the disaster film genre formula handbook. However, once this one gets going, you hardly notice. The play book demands are met as we are introduced to our heroes and villains, which mimic an episode of "Spooks" (MI-5 to American audiences), until you begin to realize that as the show progresses, there is a countdown of days. I began having an emotional response to the tension. Suddenly, the stereotypical nature of the play book began to deviate closer to the 9-11 Commission Report. The similarities were striking, and getting more realistic. As a whole, my response to the visuals created by "Dirty War" were dredging up emotions that I have not felt since those days in late 2001. Like so many others, I followed those day's events on television, and witnessed the fires of the WTC in person shortly thereafter. Needless to say, those memories were brought forward while witnessing the staged images of the film. The BBC studio elements cleverly hidden in the background television monitors were absolutely brilliant. Although I work in film and I know the tricks, the effects, and how the heart strings are plucked, it was getting harder and harder for me to disassociate that knowledge from the bubbling anger that was swelling under my breath. "I wonder if he digitally 'grew' the crowd, to make it look like he had more people than he actually hired," I wondered. (Possible spoiler alert from this point further in this review…) This line of thinking was immediately halted once the decontamination centers were set up, and the women were stripped down and hosed off… which inevitably brought up the metaphors of Auschwitz and the concentration camps. My heart-strings were in full harmony at this point, and the full effect of the fact-or-fiction aspects of the film were swimming in my head. Is this film merely propaganda? Would it be just like this, or even worse? Would Londoner's really get on like that? Inevitably, I decided the best outcome of my viewing would be to spread the word of the effect this film had on my nervous system, and that it should be shared. This film is currently on HBO, and it will also be shown, in an edited fashion on PBS. It is worth seeking out in either form.

Daniel Percival's "Dirty War", a BBC production made for television was shown recently on cable. The film has a documentary style in the way it goes after the people that caused the near holocaust in one of the big metropolis of the world, London. In fact, this film, produced in 2004 is almost a cautionary tale of the events of the following year, in which terrorists set explosive devices in the public transport that killed innocent people that were in the wrong place, at the wrong time. The film impresses for the pace the director and the production team gave to the project. There are no dull moments in the movie as we watch the preparation by the terrorists and the people that are following their dirty work. Although the inevitable happens, it's amazing just to think what would be the consequences if a real 'dirty bomb' was planted in such a densely populated area. The last images of the film have a chilling effect. The mob scenes and the way the whole area is contaminated send shivers of fear, thinking how it could possible happen anywhere.

I really liked this movie. I watched it last night on the Public Broadcasting System. The part I liked about it was the fact that they dealt with issues of today not in the future or the past. They basically had some terrorists take a van or two and rent them out to be car bombs. I think what the movie could have showed was people in different countries at the same time. It did show the fact that England, or any other country, isn't prepared for an attack on the magnitude that they showed. I have never heard of any of the actors or actresses in the movie so I can't really say if they are normally their parts. After the movie, they had this panel of experts talking about if something like that could happen here in the U.S. It was a thought-provoking discussion!