Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Cast: Simon Pegg, Maisie Richardson-Sellers, Edward Holcroft, Hanna Khalique-Brown, Adrian Lester, Tom McKay, Joss Porter, Charlie J. Tinson, Mark Rylance, Alex Jennings, German Segal, Hattie Morahan, Tinatin Dalakishvili, Andrew Rothery, Jamie Muscato, Gavi Singh Chera, Alfie Friedman, Irena Tyshyna, Ed Stoppard, Kerry Godliman, Aysha Kala, Julie Barclay, Yasmin Wilde, Daniel O’Meara, Bharti Patel, Nikita Zabolotny, Julian Harries, Sean La-Tunje, Melanie Gutteridge, Nitin Ganatra.
None of us are immune to the war that is going in around us, and whilst we may not have bullets and bombs flying over our heads, destroying our homes and leaving hospitals and other valuable building being targeted by an aggressive foreign power hell bent on wiping us from the face of the planet, that does not exclude us from feeling the effects of a war fought out in the open, for we are now vulnerable in ways that only two generations ago would have been in the realms of science fiction, but which are now, terrifyingly, as real as witnessing enemy planes overhead and soldiers on street corners.
We live in a time when your neighbour is a victim of state sponsored cyber terrorism, a hack of a doctor’s patient confidential reports here, false information spread via the internet against your best friend there, a torrent of vile and disagreeable opinions seemingly coming from the most respectable of people…this is price we are collectively paying for being targeted in The Undeclared War, a conflict that does not have to follow the rules of warfare, a sense of combat where it comes down which a programmer comes up with a way to cripple an economy and send its enemy back to the stone age and leave the people without any amenity or belief in its own government.
All nations are guilty of this, the manipulation of the news, the almost every day reveal that a hospital’s infrastructure has been breached, a bank that has lost all its money; it goes on around us every day, and in which, for the most part as yet, we are blissfully unaware.
In The Undeclared War, the six-part series directed by Peter Kosminsky, British intelligence via GCHQ is put under tremendous strain, somehow the Russians have found a way to finally infiltrate the security of the nation and send it spiralling to a conclusion of their choosing, one that is helped, aided by those on the inside with their own axe to grind, and their own philosophy willing to see the country burn.
Set against the backdrop of a general election and just enough in the future to allow the viewer glimpses of the inevitable conclusion of our own present day’s decisions and in many cases reckless abandonment of care by the current government, the serial unveils a picture of disharmony in the nation, and one that is taken full advantage of by a country with revenge fully on its mind.
The point of the drama is understood, where once the sea, our being an island was enough to see us survive an assault on the sovereignty of the nation, by opening ourselves up to the world wide web, by allowing gas, electric, water and a whole plethora of other utilities available to outside forces, we have lost control of what makes us safe; we have gone to bed with an enemy, we have flirted with them, we have made advances and accepted theirs, and with one stroke of a keyboard, we can pay for that in a mere moment’s thought,
It takes conviction to portray absolute fear, to know that you are powerless to stop the inevitable, and with Simon Pegg, Hanna Khalique-Brown, Kerry Godliman, and Mark Rylance giving tremendous performances in their pursuit of realism, The Undeclared War is a reasoned encounter with possible dystopian sabotage, and one that we need to understand that the British are just as capable of targeting the innocent who have no fight with their fellow humans in other countries, and that we should be ashamed of being able to do what we know the Russians can achieve.
Ian D. Hall