What to watch

🇮🇪 Blue Lights | 📷 Civil War

19 April 2024

TV

Siân Brooke

Blue Lights

When Blue Lights debuted on BBC One last year, says Benji Wilson in The Daily Telegraph, many people thought the last thing the world needed was another cop show. Yet season one, which follows a batch of newly qualified officers in post-Troubles Belfast, proved them wrong “on every count”. Its creators, Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson, knew the turf well – they “cut their teeth on Panorama”. But the pillars of its success were “the pillars of all good drama”: characters, relationship, and a setting that is both “vital and credible”.

Season two, which was released on Monday, is just as good. Siân Brooke returns, along with the “brilliant” newcomers Katherine Devlin and Nathan Braniff. The action follows broadly the same plot lines – “there are drugs everywhere” and not enough police to do anything about it – but with the addition of brand-new loyalist kingpin Lee Thompson (Seamus O’Hara) to dish out lashings of “moral chaos”. Skipping “effortlessly from comedy to breakneck drama”, it’s an irresistible watch.

Blue Lights is available on BBC iPlayer, here.
Two seasons.

Film

Kirsten Dunst

Civil War

As difficult as it might be for us Americans to stomach, says Jordan Hoffman in Foreign Policy, this brilliant new blockbuster isn’t to be missed. Set in a civil war-torn US in the near future, it follows a band of reporters (Kirsten Dunst, Priscilla’s Cailee Spaeny, and others) trying to land an interview with the president before the White House falls. With “some of the most intense combat film-making” to come out of Hollywood in decades, this is Alex Garland, the British director behind Ex Machina, at his best. It’s tempting to interpret the whole thing as a parable about the dangers of Donald Trump. But Garland sensibly leaves the origins of the conflict hazy – “an alliance between California and Texas? Huh?” – which counterintuitively makes “the insanity of civil war that much clearer”.

You can’t fault Garland’s storytelling, says Christina Newland in iNews. The character-driven approach to horrific battle set pieces is “compelling, occasionally jaw-dropping and thrilling to watch”. And there’s no shortage of evocative spectacles: “suicide bombers wrapping themselves in Stars and Stripes; gushing arterial wounds as whizzing bullets pierce the flesh”. But there’s also a strange emptiness to the film. For all the “elegantly rendered smouldering bridges and mortar-darkened skies”, it basically refuses to say anything beyond: “war is destructive”. Given Garland’s calibre – and the fact that the film comes in the build-up to an election that could well result in the “capsizing of democracy” – that feels like a missed opportunity.

Civil War is out in cinemas now.
1hr 50mins.

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