We already know how devastating it can be if Internet access in a country is reduced or cut off by an attacker. It's not just the fact that you can't scroll TikTok. Banks will not be able to operate, credit card transactions will not be possible, and even electricity and water may be affected. Peacock/Channel 4's new thriller imagines how cyber warfare could rapidly escalate in the near future, and what the implications might be.
Undeclared War: Stream or skip.
Opening Shot: A young woman is searching what appears to be an empty carnival grounds.
Key point: is her in 2024. Sarah Parvin (Hannah Curriek Brown) is shown opening manhole covers, climbing down brick walls and entering locked cabanas. The scene seems to shift all the time. What she's really doing is speeding up to attend her coding exam and a 'work experience' position at the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is up for grabs. She is second only to Vadim Trusov (German Segal) who is very quick, but both are offered jobs.
She wants to tell her father Ahmed (Nitinganatra) that she has been unwell lately. No one in her family knows about this classified and somewhat dangerous job. She's assigned to the Malware Department, and she's caught in an emergency as soon as she enters the building. As an engineer stresses running her tests, much of her access to the Internet in the UK goes down. A phone call to the head of the department, Danny Patrick (Simon Pegg), reveals that malware has run and brought the system down, with stress testing used as cover.
As engineers try to bring the service back online, Saara is tasked with testing the code in a walled sandbox environment. However, she found a small line of code that was set to run another malware her program when a "like" hit on a particular her Facebook page. Danny is very grateful and takes her to a meeting of Prime Minister Andrew Makinde's (Adrian Lester) cabinet, who is facing her re-election, as her people are reeling from the ongoing recession. to go. When a particularly mean-spirited cabinet member pointed out that an intern had found the code and not a high-paid engineer executive at GCHQ, Danny had to remove the code to make sure there were no other triggers. She knows she has to go line by line.
Meanwhile, Saara receives bad news personally, her dedication to her new job and this cyberattack puts her in a major conflict with her family. Danny is under pressure from his superiors to declare Russia as the source of the attack, but the resulting escalation causes everything that relies on the country's Internet services—basically everything—to He knows it can go down.
What shows do you remember? CSI: Cyber. No, it was also about cyber attacks, but Undeclared War treats cyber threats with a little more realism and respect. It seems that.
Our opinion: One thing we always hated about shows centered around people working with code was staring at people looking at code. (Believe me, we've been staring at the proportion of code in our lives, and we've found it very boring (for non-programmers The Undeclared Warwriter and showrunner Peter Kosminsky has solved this problem, at least for what Saara sees when diving into the code. The stylistic choice is one of the reasons the show creates just the right amount of tension and personal drama.
The opening scene is a strange hodgepodge of places, a strange place. Doors, jumping from place to place show how Sara is coded, another scene where she walks through a dark file archive room shows how she scrolls through the code. In another scene, I find myself in a phone booth in the middle of a field, sifting through phone books until I find a small anomaly.I really appreciate Kosminsky and company's attempt to make Saara's process more dramatic.
In many ways, the story feels more along the lines of 24 or Homeland. Characters get their inner lives, while the rest of the characters become one-dimensional features.Coders like Max (Tom McKay) spew jargon and pretend to be there to stare at the screen. Feels, gives Danny and Sara people a bounce back.But that's fine with us because of the possible cyber warfare that could be launched in an election year due to a less cautious government approach.
Gender and Skin: None
Farewell Shot: Sarah wakes up in bed, lying next to her boyfriend.
Sleeper Star: Mark, who also appears in this series, has yet to hear from her Rylance. I'm curious what his role will be. And, of course, Simon Pegg is also good as his boss, practically apologizing to his men when the government bureaucracy is busy writing code day and night.
Most of the Pilot's Line: When Sara enters her GCHQ building and meets Max, she extends her hand. "We're not shaking hands at the moment," he says. They're trying to portray 2024 as a post-pandemic world, but the mask's presence in this and another scene shows that fear of that or that is still hanging around. It feels like a poop or out of the pot situation.
Our call: Stream it. The Undeclared War features excellent lead performances, creative storytelling, and a plot that steadily builds tension. It's also a plus that you don't have to look at that much code.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and technology, but he doesn't make fun of himself, he's a junkie . His writings have appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon,RollingStone.com,VanityFair.comand Fast Company. It has been.
