Alicia I love this movie so much

Evengyny Thanks for the memories!

Contentar Best movie of this year hands down!

Livestonth I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

pepekwa I lived in London most of my adult life before I moved stateside so missed this film when it came out and only saw this now on HBO. I disagree with anyone who thinks this should have been a Hollywood production, the UK team gave it a chilling and foreboding atmosphere from day one and I was on the edge of my seat for the last 30 minutes wondering what was going to happen to my home city. And of course,nine months after the film comes out 7/7 happens. Yes, the truth is stranger than fiction. Having lived in both countries, it is also clear the likelihood of this happening in the UK is much greater than in the US, muslims live in ghettos and isolate themselves in the UK, in the US they assimilate much more readily.

shamrocks2121 This is one of those movies that could have (and should have) been picked up by a movie studio and done up to be an educational blockbuster, but for their own reasons (my guess is another attack) Hollywood never did. Which is a shame because it really is a story that does need to be told. Even more than "Finding Neverland" if you could believe it. Anyway, beside the premise for this movie which is a great one, this movie could have been a whole lot better - even for a made for TV movie. The cast is weak and the emotions they try and show look very overacted and fake. Probably the two best features of this film is seeing how the London police adapt all the technology that they used to use in tracking the IRA and apply it as best they can to the Muslim terrorists of today with mixed success. That and they teach how a terrorist cell is constructed and how it works. I realize that these plots are somewhat taboo in today's environment and a huge risk for a movie studio to risk a whole lot of money on, but this is a story that needs to be told and even though they tried as best they could, in the end they failed in this movie.

Robert J. Maxwell It's hard to imagine an American movie like this. The dirty bomb is not seen to explode. We only know it's gone off because London trembles. Even if we had seen it detonate, a dirty bomb is not a patch on a thermonuclear device. Only a few shots are fired and nobody's head disintegrates. There are no sneering greaseball villains, only devout men and women and their children. There is full frontal nudity during decontamination but it is handled so matter of factly, and the bodies themselves are so ordinary, that one feels only embarrassment for the characters.I won't go into the plot in any detail. Basically its about a group of radical Muslims who detonate a dirty bomb in London, and the attempt of British control agents to prevent it and then to contain it. That's about it.The movie is not sensationalistic in any way and is sometimes a bit hard to follow. One of the principals is an attractive Muslim police officer who has to explain to her colleagues (and to us groundlings) that only a tiny fraction of Muslims are fanatics and so forth, as if we needed it. (We didn't need the speech because the film illustrates the point.) It makes a few cogent points. One police officer observes that they know 90 percent of what the IRA are up to, and yet a few attacks still get through. How can they effectively prevent attacks by radical Muslims about whom they know practically nothing? Well -- they can't, of course, and neither can anyone else. All it takes to pull off such an event is a little organization, a knowledge of chemistry, and a willingness to die. It's like murdering a President or a monarch. If you want to do it badly enough, it can be done.The British police are seen playing roughhouse with the captured organizer of the plot -- dunking his head in a bath tub to make him talk about the next target, and so forth. During his interrogation the organizer mentions atrocity against Muslims in Kabul and Bagdhad as an explanation for the attack. The police remind him that he has a wife and child and that they are now in custody, but the organizer isn't perturbed. "What will this accomplish?" they ask him. "You know there will be retaliation." And he says placidly, comfortable in his skin, "We expect your retaliation. It is what unites us and divides you." Once social organizations get into these kinds of conflicts, they seem to turn into schoolyard fist fights. Push-Pull machines. One side says we're doing this because you hit us first. The other side says, maybe, but I was just hitting you because you hit me yesterday. Oh, yeah? What about last week when you knocked the books out of my hand? Well I only did that because your father insulted my grandfather one thousand years ago.I realize the movie deals with a real subject and that the subject is serious, and I realize my example is silly. Yet there does seem to be something in human nature that drives us into conflict with one another, and of course it's always the other party's fault, not ours. I wonder if some day, given the survival of our species, we may find that the same primitive subcortical structures are involved in a schoolyard fight and a global war.Homo "sapiens", my foot.

George Parker The BBC and HBO teamed up to create "Dirty War", a 90 minute TV movie about a terrorist "dirty bomb" attack in London. The film gets down to business quickly as it packs both the terrorist and the government anti-terrorist efforts into the film leaving little room for human interest subplots. On the terrorist side we follow the bomb from the smuggling of radioactive materials to assembly to deployment to detonation. On the government side we see PR and training exercises, intelligence gathering and analysis, interdiction, post-detonation response, and follow up. The film also imparts a sense of how Al-Qa'ida type terrorist cells are organized, the radical Islamic terrorist mentality, and terrorist strategies. A sort of anatomy of a "dirty bomb" incident, "Dirty War" will answer many questions lurking in the minds of a public becoming ever more aware of this insidious threat. (B)