#Official secrets netflix cast movie#
#Official secrets netflix cast trial#

#Official secrets netflix cast trial#

How much influence if any did Gun’s trial have on the inquiry? Did her righteous lawyer Ben Emmerson or the journalist Martin Bright have anything to do with it? Why did the inquiry start in 2009, finish in 2011 and not produce its final report into 20-freakin’-16? How did Tony Blair respond? Why hasn’t any of this political shade stretched past the Atlantic and fallen onto Bush, a figure now bizarrely remembered as “not as bad as Trump”? And what does any of this say about the power of the press and our beloved mythology about Woodward and Bernstein taking down a US President? Why couldn’t The Observer have done the same with Tony Blair?Ī Limited Series or multi-part documentary would have a better shot at capturing that than a prestige drama with awards ambitions, but even if you just want to tell Katharine Gun’s story and not continue on into the Iraq Inquiry a Limited Series would probably be better at it than Official Secrets.

#Official secrets netflix cast movie#

That last part feels like a movie unto itself. Then, text on the screen solemnly reminds us of the total lives lost in the ill-fated Iraq war and then tells us that 7 years after Gun first tried to expose her government’s lies an official inquiry found even more evidence of the ways the Bush and Blair administrations conspired to lie us into war. (Last year’s On the Basis of Sex attempted a similar “and now here’s the real person!” trick at the end.) Instead, we switch to news footage of the real Gun walking out of a courthouse and being interviewed by the press, removing Knightley from the screen at the most important moment. The movie, for example and spoiler, just ends without so much as a final, dramatic reunion between Gun and her husband Yasar (played by Adam Bakri), the pair meant to be the emotional center of the story.

Official Secrets is so busy with the business of honoring the truth sayers and condemning the powerful that it does lose track of its emotional throughline. We saying and say nothing until things are really rotten.” “The question the film asks for any of us is, ‘When do you speak up?’ When do we, as people within an organization, speak up at the risk of losing our job? And the truth is, most people tend to support the status quo. It’s not that complicated,” Hood told Total Film. “You look at the story of Katharine Gunn and you get it. If nothing else, Official Secrets is a rather effective roadmap for how a whistleblower complaint works its way through the system, but it wants to be that as well as tribute to Gun and anyone who would dare speak truth to power. spying operation against members of the United Nations Security Council-proposed blackmailing smaller, undecided member states into voting for war.However, the overall effect of switching lead characters – from Gun to Bright to Emmerson – and condensing a year of legal history into a two-hour story gives Official Secrets the feel of an interesting magazine article or perhaps a star-studded episode of Law & Order: UK posing as a movie.

The memo-which exposed an illegal U.S.-U.K. Matt Smith stars alongside Keira Knightley, with two-time Academy Award® nominee Ralph Fiennes and Matthew Goode.īased on the book ‘The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War’, Official Secrets tells the true story of British secret-service officer Katharine Gun, who during the immediate run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq leaked a top-secret National Security Agency memo. Adapted by Academy Award® winning filmmaker Gavin Hood, the feature film is made with support and investment from Screen Yorkshire through its Yorkshire Content Fund. The dramatic and gripping true life story stars two-time Oscar®-nominated actress Keira Knightley as courageous journalist Katharine Gun, who leaked a top-secret National Security Agency memo, putting her life and career on the line and changing the course of modern history.