The Day Shall Come, Terminator - Dark Fate and Official Secrets

As a pastiche on the war on terror, it was hard to say who was more inept, the "good" guys or the "bad" guys. It must be the FBI, the police and Homeland Security as the bad guys were not bad at all, just stupid. But how much more interesting would it have been if the bad guys had been white and the FBI etc black. So in the end, this was a predictable satire with some witty dialogue from writer and director Chris Morris.

After Terminators 1 and 2, I deliberately avoided the next three. However, the latest in the series had better reviews and gained credibility and ingenuity from having three women in the leads.  Basically a re-run of T2, but fortunately there is enough story and dialogue keep us interested. The special effects are predictably monotonous, but Linda Hamilton, Mackenzie Davis and Natalia Reyes interact well and director Tim Miller's focus on their plight is just right. It was great that Arnold does not appear until well into the second half and we have to wait one hour and twenty five minutes before we hear those familiar beats.

I have no memory of the true story of Katherine Gun, the woman who worked at GCHQ  who leaked the memo from the NSA in the USA asking her and her colleagues to find damaging information on certain countries so that they would vote for a war with Iraq in the United Nations. This is therefore a drama documentary about how she was arrested for breaking the official secrets act. I found the best scenes were at The Observer Newspaper. They had originally supported the idea of war with Iraq, but after a gripping story of how they verified the memo, published the document on the front page.

The whole cast is excellent, the three stars (Keira Knightly, Matt Smith and Ralph Fiennes) are supplemented by an array of serious British acting talent: Mathew Goode, Rhys Ifans, Jeremy Northam, Tamsin Greig, Hattie Morahan, MyAnna Buring, Indira Varma, Kenneth Cranham and an outstanding Monica Dolan as Knightly's boss at GCHQ. Director Gavin Hood explains the drama well and the adaptation of the book "The Spy who tried to stop a War" is excellent. I found the tension built along the way to that dramatic finale.