Steven Rickett

Relativist history at it worst. Because we are all guilty of something (and we are) the worst mass torturers and murderers aren't much worse than us. Germany accepts the guilt of the Nazis but Japan has no reason to accept its equivalent guilt. Read some history and count the numbers.

A perfect person does perfect things. No risk because they can't loose. No heroism because they can't fail. Like watching Hussain Bolt win at a school sports day.

The delicious yearning of an E M Foster novel. The inescapable destructivness of wilful ignorance. Moral cowardice proclaiming meaningless atonement. Could the same film be made today.

At the beginning of the film the journalist's son says you don't tell tales, an injunction against the journalist's trade from the person closest to her. As a western need not be about cowboys a political thriller need not be about politics. This film is about the retribution a journalist brings upon herself for a disastrous moral lapse. The lapse is revealed at the end of the film when the journalist's source is shown to be a vulnerable person who she manipulated for ambition. Repeatedly questioned when they should not have been. The ambition is emphasised with a journalistic prize. Step by step the journalist and subject of the newspaper story are matched. They are both competent professionals, career women. Mothers. They are in essence the same person. They have face to face confrontations twice and both times their duty as mothers to protect the children is emphasised. (The second confrontation is the best scene of the film.) The disasters befalling the journalist match the disasters that befall the subjects family because of the newspaper story and unusually both fathers leave with their children. Retribution in the form of the prosecuting lawyer stalk the journalist incessantly, cruelly, but the journalist finally accepts her fate as just, or at least inescapable for an even worse outcome awaits. Revealing her source would inevitably bring condemnation and the excuse colleagues and family need for their lack of support. Accept your punishment or worse will come. The lawyers are the moral arbiters. Some are humane; the judge, the defence lawyer. Others idealistically disinterested; the Supreme Court. The primary lawyer is relentless. The newspaper story itself is revealed as insignificant as it is based on a report from a minority of one. Other government advisers reached the opposite conclusion. "President follows majority expert opinion" is the real headline. The journalists are little concerned with the significance only its tittle tattle. Government officials pursue the leaker, quite happy to eat their own regardless of guilt. A motiveless assassin inflicts the punishment on the guiltless. Don't tittle tattle, its motives are different from that of a real story, for you can't know what will be unleashed.

Over a thousand years ago people thought differently than they do now. We can't truly know how they thought but we can try. Bernard Cornwell and The Last Kingdom tries hard. There are plenty of compromises to a modern audience but it is easy to forgive them all because it wants to be a good yarn, and it is. Popular historical fiction/drama at its finest.