For being based on the book The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War by Marcia & Thomas Mitchell, it at least does an ample job pushing more attention towards this subject that deserves notice. Official Secrets doesn’t quite have the right gravitas to be a little more than a shocking eye-opener but it’s still a worthy and notable dissection of how corruption and fear became a driving force during a time of chaos. Ralph Fiennes is perfectly intimidating as British barrister Ben Emmerson, calmly trying to stress to Gun how much power his government has and how far they are willing to go to destroy her life. Matt Smith has a great presence as journalist Martin Bright, showing great interest and whispering concern. Not only could she be locked up but her husband could face imprisonment as well for merely existing amid a highly charged political issue.ĭirector Gavin Hood brilliantly pushes the tension of this story to a believable degree without slipping into docudrama pitfalls. They need not merely charge her with treason as they can go after her marriage to a Muslim. And in trying to get her to shut up and disavow the secrets she has unleashed, government officials start to target and discredit her. Once her involvement is figured out, she becomes a target of treason. She weighs her options carefully about how to get this information out there and does so by going through journalists to make the memo known. She wants her revealment to remain a secret but something within her must know this will not be something she can slide under the radar without answering for. Knightley perfectly portrays Gun as a woman with quivering concerns about doing the right thing. This directive from the NSA is frightening enough that Gun considers pulling the trigger on unleashing this memo to let everyone know what is really going on within national politics that will lead to war. The goal of this spying was to obtain secret information from other nations and perhaps use that info to blackmail other nations into supporting the Iraq War. While working within the GCHQ, she unearths a memo that details a spy operation orchestrated by the United States of America. Keira Knightley plays the whistleblower of Katharine Gun, a specialist working within British Intelligence. Official Secrets is one such tale of how a whistleblower tried to call out the lead up to the Iraq War and went to desperate lengths to make this information public, stirred up in a dramatic docudrama. Thankfully, the 21st century has provided more open and accurate records of current events so we need not look too far to the past to uncover insidious secrets. What more there is to the stories of politics and war often get buried in the public record, relegated to what those in power wish to be their legacy. Actors: Keira Knightley, Matt Smith, Matthew Goode, Rhys Ifans, Adam Bakri, Ralph Fiennes, Conleth Hill, Indira Varma, Jeremy Northam, John Heffernan, Monica Dolan, Tamsin Greig, Niccy Lin, Jack Farthing, Gabrielle Downey, Fiona Skinner, MyAnna Buring, Lindy Whiteford, Ray Panthaki, Janie Dee Directors: Gavin Hood Producers: Ged Doherty, Elizabeth Fowler, Melissa Shiyu Zuo Writers: Gregory Bernstein, Sara Bernstein, Gavin Hood, Marcia Mitchell, Thomas Mitchell Studio: EntertainmentOne Genres: Drama, Thrillers Collections: 2020, .uk Through Time Unable to stand by, Gun defies her government and leaks the memo to the press, beginning an explosive chain of events that will ignite an international firestorm, expose a vast political conspiracy, and put Gun and her family in harm's way. Based on true events, 'Official Secrets' tells the story of Katharine Gun (Keira Knightley), a British intelligence specialist who received a shocking memo in 2003: the United States is enlisting Britain's help in blackmailing United Nations Security Council members so they vote in favour of the Iraq War. She risked everything to stop an unjust war.
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