With her life, liberty and marriage threatened, she must stand up for what she believes in…īringing actors to Official Secrets was always going to be a challenge. ![]() Charged with breaking the Official Secrets Act, and facing imprisonment, Katharine and her lawyers set out to defend her actions. We are all the better for it.In the volatile political climate of 2003, Britain and the US angle to invade Iraq, GCHQ translator Katharine Gun leaks a classified e-mail that urges spying on members of the UN Security Council to force through the resolution to go to war. He may have been derided the most for X-Men, but since Deadpool fixed it all in the new timeline, Hood has been freed to make much more compelling fare like Official Secrets. Hood is much better at these more personal films that ask big questions than he was at handling CGI-laden spectacles. These last two efforts by Hood more than make up for his previous big-budget efforts of Ender’s Game, and the disastrous film that was X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Having previously directed Eye in the Sky, which dealt with the blurring lines of moral ambiguity as it relates to issues within the global war on terror, Gavin Hood continues to refine his ability to navigate these types of morality tales. Director Gavin Hood ably handles the political pressures and cover-ups that come crashing in on Katherine, creating a compelling story filled with tension as to Katherine’s legal fate. Knightley does a fine job in this role and the supporting cast, which includes Matthew Goode, Ralph Fiennes, Matt Smith, and Rhys Ifans, is very strong. The film documents her attempt to defend herself against the charges, which paints her as being guilty of treason against her country, despite not being able to mount a defense as any testimony she would need to give would cause her to violate The Official Secrets Act further. When she is outed as the source of the leak for the memo, she is charged with breaching the Official Secrets Act. Katherine eventually becomes a whistle-blower by giving a copy of the letter to a friend who passes it on to a journalist with The Observer. Katharine is torn between her loyalty to her country through her service in her agency, and the moral imperative that she expose the contents of the memo so that British soldiers aren’t sent to die based on political blackmail based on the Intel her agency would be sending to cooperate with the orders. Security Council so that the Intel gained can be used to assist the NSA’s joint US-UK operation intending to force these nations to support the proposed war in Iraq. ![]() ![]() A high priority request comes across her computer giving orders to effectively spy on nations who are members of the U.N. She is not a field agent, but she is a spy. ![]() Keira Knightley is Katharine Gun, a woman who works for British Intelligence, primarily using her language skills to interpret communications in the foreign languages she speaks. The movie Official Secrets is a film about this very subject. position, in the run-up to the war as Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the United Nations to make the case for going to war. This of course had political repercussions here in the United States, but many Americans might not understand what was happening across the pond in Great Britain, and Prime Minister Tony Blair’s support of the U.S. Following the war, the cache of weapons were not found. In a post-9/11 world, the United States was determined to keep nations like these from using these weapons, or selling these weapons to groups who would use these type of weapons, against us. As we know from the recent past, the pretext for war in Iraq, in 2003, was due to the threat of “WMD’s” (Weapons of Mass Destruction) being possessed by Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein.
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