The Undeclared War Is a Prescient But Ponderous Cyberthriller: Review
The post The Undeclared War Is a Prescient But Ponderous Cyberthriller: Review appeared first on Consequence.
The Pitch: It’s 2024, and a post-Brexit Great Britain faces a general election beset on all sides with misinformation, anti-government grievance, and stark division on all sides. What’s more, a foreign cyberattack hits the country’s Internet access, hitting everything except social media.
Luckily, it hits the same day 21-year-old student Saara Parvan (newcomer Hannah Khalique-Brown) starts her work placement stint at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the UK’s first defense against cyberterrorism. She quickly figures out how to disable it, and even finds a second exploit that would have further crippled England’s infrastructure.
It’s a hollow victory, though, as the young Muslim woman struggles to fit into the “tediously male, stale, and pale” organization even after her impressive first day. Among her allies are terse supervisor Danny Patrick (Simon Pegg), who has to handle the political fallout as much as the nitty-gritty facts on the ground; a veteran GCHQ analyst (Mark Rylance) who pines for the days of old-school espionage; and an American NSA liaison (Legends of Tomorrow‘s Maisie Richardson-Sellars) who relates to her feelings of outsiderdom.
Who sent the virus? And what else do they have planned to erode Britain’s confidence in its government and systems, much less its fellow man? These are the questions Saara will have to mull over, one line of code at a time.
Brexit Through the Grift Shop: From its first moments, The Undeclared War attempts to set itself apart from the crop of serious-minded British political thrillers that drop on ITV and Channel 4 like snow in winter. Our initial glimpse of Saara’s work ethic comes, curiously, with her walking through a seemingly-empty carnival. She manifests items from a Batman-tier utility belt, the exact one for whatever she needs, using it to break into an empty room with a hidden door stuck to the ceiling.
Then, writer-director Peter Kosminsky (White Oleander) intercuts this with footage of Saara clacking away at a keyboard — we’re watching her work, the show offering us a fanciful, Matrix-y representation of her hacking skills. It sort of works, at least to save us from more tedious scenes of glazed-over eyes poring over inscrutable text. But it’s also clumsily handled to the point of confusion, literalizing her actions to the point of infantilization.
The Undeclared War (Peacock)
But bless these sections of The Undeclared War for at least giving us something dynamic to look at. The rest of the show runs at a dial-up modem’s pace, its six 50-minute episodes weighed down by leaden pacing, office politics, and supremely shallow examinations of everything from Russian troll farms to election conspiracies.
To its credit, the performances are committed: Khalique-Brown turns in fine work as the audience perspective character, a brusque, withdrawn wunderkind torn between the classified urgency of her work at GCHQ and the very real expectations and needs of her family. She does a lot with a little, keeping up with the sleepy but dedicated performances from fellow British icons like Pegg and Rylance. Adrian Lester also shows up as the feckless PM, a Tory whom the show tells us ousted Boris Johnson in a nasty palace coup months prior. His biggest concern is making sure the cyberattack doesn’t disrupt his presumed reelection chances.
Reflexive Control: Much like The Looming Tower or We Own This City before it, The Undeclared War seems most interested in taking its mouthpiece characters through the meticulous research its creators have given to the subject. Here, it’s the impact of successful cyberattacks on Western civilization. When the show takes a detour to follow the Russian side of things for an episode, we see a seminar that outlines the ways they plan to destabilize the West from within.
We see Russian trolls starting arguments with each other over Twitter to get other people hopping on the fight, and see how propaganda outlets like RT gin up outrage from the left while local British press do so from the right. “So it’s all made up?” one new reporter for an RT-like outlet asks her British counterpart. “I prefer the term ‘managed’,” she responds.
The Undeclared War (Peacock)
Kosminsky wants to take us through every step of the journey bad actors take to use the Internet to make us turn on each other, and these moments feel well-paced and interesting. Unfortunately, it’s frequently interrupted by the warmed-over interpersonal drama of Saara’s life, which doesn’t convey the same sense of journalistic rigor as the cyber-stuff.
On top of the familial tension she feels as a young Muslim woman working for an organization that more than likely spies on Muslims daily (she insists she doesn’t do that stuff), there’s her disappointing relationship with a man and the promise of a new queer relationship that complicates everything. If it had proper focus, it could have maybe worked. As is, it distracts from Saara’s struggles to keep the world from burning, and doesn’t justify its own existence.
The Verdict: The issue of cybersecurity is often overlooked in our daily lives; we take so much of the Internet for granted that its absence — or its adverse effect on our daily and political lives — would genuinely unravel our civilization. When The Undeclared War ratchets up the tension of that possibility, it’s relatively gripping.
It’s too bad, then, that the rest of it is content to shuffle along at a snail’s pace, taking us down detours and refusing to engage more deeply with its political concerns. Deepfakes and troll farms are nothing to sneeze at, after all. But The Undeclared War says nothing about those things that hasn’t been said with more verve and imagination than any given episode of Black Mirror.
Where’s It Playing? The Undeclared War hits Peacock with little warning on Thursday, August 18th.
Trailer:
The Undeclared War Is a Prescient But Ponderous Cyberthriller: Review
Clint Worthington
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