pepekwa I lived in London most of my adult life before I moved stateside so missed this film when it came out and only saw this now on HBO. I disagree with anyone who thinks this should have been a Hollywood production, the UK team gave it a chilling and foreboding atmosphere from day one and I was on the edge of my seat for the last 30 minutes wondering what was going to happen to my home city. And of course,nine months after the film comes out 7/7 happens. Yes, the truth is stranger than fiction. Having lived in both countries, it is also clear the likelihood of this happening in the UK is much greater than in the US, muslims live in ghettos and isolate themselves in the UK, in the US they assimilate much more readily.

contractassassin Dirty War is absolutely one of the best political, government, and well written T.V. Drama's in the 25 years.The acting is superb, the writing is spectacular.Diry War reveals the true side of why we are not ready to respond to a Nuclear, Biological, and Radiological Terrorist Attack here on American soil.Dirty War should be made into a major motion picture - It's that good! I highly recommend this great drama to everyone who desire to know the truth.This T.V. drama reveals how British Intelligence (MI5 & MI6) attempt to expose a terrorist plot and conspiracy to destroy innocent victims -because of England's involvement in the Iraq War.The scenes of different parts of London, England are also spectacular.Dirty War is a must see!!!

Robert J. Maxwell It's hard to imagine an American movie like this. The dirty bomb is not seen to explode. We only know it's gone off because London trembles. Even if we had seen it detonate, a dirty bomb is not a patch on a thermonuclear device. Only a few shots are fired and nobody's head disintegrates. There are no sneering greaseball villains, only devout men and women and their children. There is full frontal nudity during decontamination but it is handled so matter of factly, and the bodies themselves are so ordinary, that one feels only embarrassment for the characters.I won't go into the plot in any detail. Basically its about a group of radical Muslims who detonate a dirty bomb in London, and the attempt of British control agents to prevent it and then to contain it. That's about it.The movie is not sensationalistic in any way and is sometimes a bit hard to follow. One of the principals is an attractive Muslim police officer who has to explain to her colleagues (and to us groundlings) that only a tiny fraction of Muslims are fanatics and so forth, as if we needed it. (We didn't need the speech because the film illustrates the point.) It makes a few cogent points. One police officer observes that they know 90 percent of what the IRA are up to, and yet a few attacks still get through. How can they effectively prevent attacks by radical Muslims about whom they know practically nothing? Well -- they can't, of course, and neither can anyone else. All it takes to pull off such an event is a little organization, a knowledge of chemistry, and a willingness to die. It's like murdering a President or a monarch. If you want to do it badly enough, it can be done.The British police are seen playing roughhouse with the captured organizer of the plot -- dunking his head in a bath tub to make him talk about the next target, and so forth. During his interrogation the organizer mentions atrocity against Muslims in Kabul and Bagdhad as an explanation for the attack. The police remind him that he has a wife and child and that they are now in custody, but the organizer isn't perturbed. "What will this accomplish?" they ask him. "You know there will be retaliation." And he says placidly, comfortable in his skin, "We expect your retaliation. It is what unites us and divides you." Once social organizations get into these kinds of conflicts, they seem to turn into schoolyard fist fights. Push-Pull machines. One side says we're doing this because you hit us first. The other side says, maybe, but I was just hitting you because you hit me yesterday. Oh, yeah? What about last week when you knocked the books out of my hand? Well I only did that because your father insulted my grandfather one thousand years ago.I realize the movie deals with a real subject and that the subject is serious, and I realize my example is silly. Yet there does seem to be something in human nature that drives us into conflict with one another, and of course it's always the other party's fault, not ours. I wonder if some day, given the survival of our species, we may find that the same primitive subcortical structures are involved in a schoolyard fight and a global war.Homo "sapiens", my foot.

szymke 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.