Over the years there have been a lot of films made that looked at key events and potential cover-ups involving world-altering events. Some are in the realms of hard-to-prove conspiracy theories and others meticulously trace out the way that evidence was eventually uncovered of high crimes and misdemeanours. It’s into this latter category that Official Secrets seems to fit – looking at the ways that the case was made by British Prime Minister Tony Blair and American President George W. Bush to go to war in Iraq. It’s now known that a lot of the ‘evidence’ to support a sooner-rather-than-later attack was either flawed or cherry-picked to suit a decision that had largely already been made.
The film tells the story of whistle-blower Katharine Gun (Keira Knightley) who works as a translator at the government’s highly-classified GCHQ. When she feels that Tony Blair is going on television and grossly misrepresenting the intelligence findings she leaks a classified e-mail that urges spying on members of the UN Security Council to force through the resolution to go to war. Her decision has major ramifications as the leak is traced to her and she is charged with breaking the UK’s Official Secrets Act. She faces imprisonment but her lawyers and several journalists (including Matt Smith, Matthew Goode, Indira Varma, Conleth Hill, Tamsin Greig, Monica Dolan, Katherine Kelly, Rhys Ifans and Ralph Fiennes) set out to defend her actions and the importance of being able to expose wrong-doing.
The film is directed by Gavin Hood (Eye in the Sky, Ender’s Game, X-Men Origins: Wolverine) and released by Entertainment One in October. It has already been screened at some festivals and received decent, if not stellar reviews (the story being well-received, but the pacing criticised). EchoChamber will formally review it on release…
