Plot: Set in 2024, The Undeclared War tracks a leading team of analysts buried in the heart of GCHQ, secretly working to ward off a series of cyber-attacks on the UK in the run up to a general election. When a routine stress test of internet infrastructure goes awry 21-year-old GCHQ intern Saara Parvin suddenly finds herself operating on the invisible frontier of high-stakes cyber warfare.
Review: We live in an era of automation, technology, and progress which also means our scariest stories will center on someone taking advantage of the advancements that make our society function. While we often see evil villains threaten the world in big-budget action movies like Mission: Impossible, the threat is a very real one and is even more frightening when presented realistically. The new series The Undeclared War proposes one such scenario that brings modern society to its knees when political superpowers play god with global infrastructure. Set over six episodes, The Undeclared War is a chilling look at our very near future that resonates with our real-world news cycle.
The Undeclared War, a co-production between Peacock and UK network Channel 4, is set just two years from now. With the leftover tensions of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ever-present specter of animosity with Vladimir Putin’ Rusia, the series starts out with a cyberattack that cripples the Internet in England. Focusing on the operatives at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the series looks at the urgent investigation into who initiated the attack, why, and if they will strike again. Over the six chapters, The Undeclared War takes a deep dive into not only the politics of the UK response to their attack but also how the intelligence agents dig through millions of pieces of data to find clues.
One of the biggest challenges in telling a geopolitical thriller without spies like James Bond, Jason Bourne, or Ethan Hunt is how to portray the minutia of scraping data for clues in an exciting manner. Series creator Peter Kosminsky and his team of writers use some clever visual tricks to show this action on screen in an Inception-like manner. As the first episode starts, we follow Saara Parvin (Hannah Khalique-Brown), an intern at GCHQ, and view her forays into the data. We see Saara walking through empty offices, climbing ladders, digging through books, and interacting with others in a surreal world that personifies the work she is doing on her keyboard. It is an interesting approach to such sequences that don’t have the flash of less realistic stories like The Matrix, The Net, or Hackers but still manages to give the work some needed immediacy.
Parvin, a relative newcomer with only a handful of credits to her name, is stellar as the brilliant Saara. Dealing with the stigma of being a woman and a Muslim in one of the most volatile roles in government, Parvin plays Saara as a character lacking confidence in her own skills but who is forced to contend with the stress of the fate of the free world riding on her shoulders. She is surrounded by veteran performers like Mark Rylance as John Yeabsley and Simon Pegg as Danny Patrick. Both Rylance and Pegg have performed in a range of projects across genres and bring a level of gravitas to this contentious story. Pegg is especially solid in a dramatic role that does not rely on his brilliant comedic timing.
The weak spot in The Undeclared War is that it thinks it is far more clever than it actually is. Already having aired overseas a couple of months ago, the series made a stir reminiscent of Orson Welles’ infamous broadcast of War of the Worlds. The ads were made to look like actual news broadcasts which sent some UK viewers into hysterics. While that type of marketing buzz would often help the ratings for a series, viewers who tuned in likely found themselves a little underwhelmed by the pacing of the series. The story sometimes feels stretched to fit a half dozen episodes and could easily have been compressed into a three-part drama, but there are several subplots that deepen our understanding of the characters, especially Saara. There are also multiple red herrings designed to throw us off the true culprit behind the cyberattacks that are much easier to figure out than the writers thought they would be.
The Undeclared War is a thriller with smart characters inhabiting a world eerily like our own. While the decisions the characters make are sometimes confounding, the realistic portrayal of what terrorism can look like without a single bullet being fired is disturbingly prescient. I commend the filmmakers for taking the risks in predicting a real-world scenario that hopefully never happens, but this series could very well seem foolishly dated in a couple of years. For now, watching this series in 2022 makes me dread what could happen in 2024 and for that alone, this series is a success. Overall, The Undeclared War could have withstood a little more editing and a tighter final episode. As it stands, this series showcases solid performances from Rylance and Pegg and a solid introduction for Hannah Khalique-Brown.
The Undeclared War premieres on August 18th on Peacock.