In October 2006 Daily Mail journalist Sarah Sands finally gets her interview with General Sir Richard Dannet, one of the top men working in the MOD. Ninety minutes later she emerged with a story that she never expected as Dannet describes why he believes that the UK should pull out of Iraq as well as being pretty damning about the political handling of the whole affair. Of course as the media sh1t storm span out of control, the split between the generals and Downing Street was talked down until a new story took the headlines, but presenter Mark Urban uses this as a jumping off point for this film, that explores the uneasy relationship between politicians and soldiers down the ages in the UK.
Nowadays we are quite used to there being tension between what politicians want and what the generals want; Iraq in particular has seen a surprising amount of serving and retired high ranking soldiers coming out to criticise the decisions that our top politicians having been making. However it does still get the headlines when it happens because it just isn't meant to happen. Of course we forget that the views, motivations and aims of these two groups will often differ even though they are on the same side so it was interesting to me to explore this relationship with this film. Substance-wise it is interesting even if it is not as detailed or fascinating as I would have hoped. There aren't many big revelations along the way, although there was enough history for me to be interested by it.
Problem is I think the makers must have worried about the strength of their own material because it tries too hard to overcompensate for it by being all hip and energetic. It does this by using lots of pop music (eg Eminem's Lose Yourself) and also have the camera zoom in and out around Mark Urban as if we were playing some sort of visual tag game across the screen. This is an annoying effect and it rather devalues the material. I can understand why they did something because history programmes are generally viewed as dry and dull but appealing to the lowest common denominator by throwing in these cheap gimmicks and assume that we all have short attention spans unless something shiny keeps us interested.
Despite this nonsense though, the film is actually pretty interesting in substance despite it not ever threatening to be a fascinating subject.
Nowadays we are quite used to there being tension between what politicians want and what the generals want; Iraq in particular has seen a surprising amount of serving and retired high ranking soldiers coming out to criticise the decisions that our top politicians having been making. However it does still get the headlines when it happens because it just isn't meant to happen. Of course we forget that the views, motivations and aims of these two groups will often differ even though they are on the same side so it was interesting to me to explore this relationship with this film. Substance-wise it is interesting even if it is not as detailed or fascinating as I would have hoped. There aren't many big revelations along the way, although there was enough history for me to be interested by it.
Problem is I think the makers must have worried about the strength of their own material because it tries too hard to overcompensate for it by being all hip and energetic. It does this by using lots of pop music (eg Eminem's Lose Yourself) and also have the camera zoom in and out around Mark Urban as if we were playing some sort of visual tag game across the screen. This is an annoying effect and it rather devalues the material. I can understand why they did something because history programmes are generally viewed as dry and dull but appealing to the lowest common denominator by throwing in these cheap gimmicks and assume that we all have short attention spans unless something shiny keeps us interested.
Despite this nonsense though, the film is actually pretty interesting in substance despite it not ever threatening to be a fascinating subject.
