HBO's Dirty War aims to rattle our complacency
By Paul Brownfield
Los Angeles Times
Posted January 26 2005
Dirty War
Airs: 9 p.m. Thursday, 4:50 a.m. Friday on HBO
HBO's Dirty War depicts to convincing effect a terrorist bombing at rush hour in central London. Killing scores of people, it sends a billowing cloud of toxic smoke over a city only partially equipped to deal with the chaotic aftermath.
Could it happen here? I don't mean another terrorist event -- I mean a movie that seeks to rattle us out of a complacent belief that the terrorism front is exclusively "over there" now (Iraq, Afghanistan, Madrid, Istanbul) and not also on the verge of happening again in our own back yard.
To that end, Dirty War, a co-production with the BBC, argues that what we don't know will hurt us, and soon. It means to rattle and awaken awareness about the so-called "war on terror" in the way that The Day After, the 1983 TV movie about a nuclear holocaust in the United States, sought to get viewers thinking harder about the implications of the Cold War nukes race. Dirty War is this kind of cautionary tale, although not as catastrophic; it's about the shadowy ways in which terrorist cells operate and how elusive the enemy is to those charged with protecting us.
In this way, Dirty War leads us to the edge of our fears about another 9-11. You will feel things watching Dirty War -- dread, certainly, and anger perhaps at the ways in which a government is shown keeping its people blissfully in the dark, but Dirty War doesn't go beyond showing what can happen, and how.
It's well-executed but almost too clinical. "Based on extensive factual research," as the film announces, Dirty War takes viewers inside the week leading up to the explosion of a "dirty bomb" -- low-grade radioactive material dispersed by a conventional explosive -- during morning rush hour. As it cuts back and forth among various worlds, the film juxtaposes the resolve and efficiency of a clandestine network of Islamic extremists with the frustrations and squabbling among authorities trying to catch a remarkably unseen enemy.
Dirty War begins with a botched emergency services drill, one whose failure doesn't prevent the minister of London (Helen Schlesinger) from spinning it as proof of London being equipped to handle a terrorist act -- a pronouncement that enrages a fire chief (Alastair Galbraith). Meanwhile, a Jordanian militant (William El-Gardi) is moving toward the final stages of a suicide plot. Over at Scotland Yard, two detectives in the antiterrorism unit (Koel Purie and Martin Savage) are piecing together the various tentacles of the terrorist operation.
Reduced to a description of its plot elements, Dirty War sounds a lot more boilerplate than it actually is. In fact, the film, directed by Daniel Percival and co-written with Lizzie Mickery, builds with a gravity rarely undermined by cheesy dialogue, a typical trap of this kind of piece. Rather, the details of the unfolding event provide the film's momentum and, ultimately, the horrifyingly convincing nature of its outcome.
PBS will air Dirty War Feb. 23, though a brief scene of frontal nudity during a decontamination scrub-down scene will be excised from the broadcast. A PBS official said the network didn't want to risk an indecency fine from the Federal Communications Commission, no doubt a pragmatic move but also a strange argument given how far from sexualized the moment is.
