HBO, BBC and PBS collaborated in producing a 90 minute film depicting the members of an Islamic terrorist group as they develop and explode a dirty bomb, a conventional explosive with some radioactive material above the explosive. Parallelling the fundamentalist, giving Dirty War some human scale, we are also shown a firefighter and his wife, an MP newly named minister for London and her top assistant, and a small police squad who happen onto the plotters–though not in time to stop them.
“The events portrayed in this film are based on extensive factual research.” That sentence, flashed on screen in the opening moments, the words are intentionally flat and emotionless, make the scenes that follow all the more chilling. For the most part, excepting the two scenes where police knock down house doors, director Daniel Percival and his writing partner Lizzie Mickery maintain that sort of everyday ambience for the entire film; even the one big explosion is left to the viewer’s imagination with the screen whiting out with a low key bit of noise.
The sequence of events, you’d usually say the plot, unfolds like the ticks of a clock. Someone in Pakistan has gotten hold of radioactive dust and carefully packs the shielded containers with bubble wrap in wholesale size cooking oil cans, then pours in the cooking oil to fill; the truck arrives in Bulgaria, the pallet transfered to an English driver’s lorrie; the barrels are unloaded in a quiet section of London and then delivered to the house where three bombs are to be made.
Some Muslim woman who owns a corner shop tips off the police and the newest addition to the anti-terror squad, a young Westernized muslim woman, runs the lead through the bureaucracy. All very methodical. Her team manages to identify the two men tipped by the shop owner and arrests them as they’re packing to flee. Despite somewhat aggressive interrogation techniques neither will talk, of course, other than to proclaim the greatness of their God. The Muslim copper finds a lead to another location used by the cell and races there, arriving just before the first bomb is exploded, at 8 a.m. outside a busy Underground station.
The police have identified two other vans that may be carrying addition dirty bombs but to avoid spooking the drivers are not moving in. One of the vans suddenly drives off and an unmarked car darts out in front, shooting quickly enough to kill the terrorists before their bomb is detonated. The remaining 15 minutes or so are used to show the aftermath, a bit of the personal, mostly larger scale, especially the containment of crowds of potentially irradiated people, tens of thousands, who were far enough away to escape a violent death but close enough to the explosion to need decontamination. These people are not happy at the slow pace and lack of comforts.
The final shots are an aerial tour of the huge section of London which has been fenced off and cannot be entered for 30-50 years. Millions of square feet of office space, thousands of shops and homes, cars left to rust in place. No mention of that third bomb either.
The actors are almost unnoticable, though I mean this as a compliment. Koel Purie, Ewan Stewart, Alistair Galbraith and William El-Gardi, thinking back on the performances, were so submerged in their characters they were able to deliver what Percival needed from them. Compared to, for instance, the histrionics seen constantly in 24 the cast allows viewers space and mental energy to consider the real world meaning of what would be a catastrophe dwarfing 9/11 or the Madrid bombings.
highly recommended
Note: This topic has been popular recently with Hollywood types: TNT and the BBC co-produced a miniseries called The Grid, FX had a film called Smallpox, Day 3 of 24 had narco-terrorists attempt to infect LA with a very nasty bug and the current series is going in the direction of Islamic terrorists and nuclear emergency on our soil, and A&E’s (British import) MI-5 has more than one episode on some aspect of the concept; one can even go back a few years to the George Clooney/Nicole Kidman movie The Peacemaker. The excellent PBS series frontline features al qeada’s new front tonight while that network will broadcast Dirty War late next month. Further, John Robb’s latest post to Global Guerillas suggests that despite the absense of any successful attacks on American soil in three years there has not been an absense of planning for them.
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