Slow Horses

Image from http://www.impawards.com/tv/slow_horses_xxlg.html

Here is an interesting collaboration between British Actors and The Apple Company. While not sure if Microsoft plans to get into the movie making business, this directional shift seemed in some way really natural. With the input of Steve Jobs in the creative and design process and the skill with which the company delivered their famous Apple Computer ad in the early eighties, you could almost have predicted an entrance into Tinseltown. In the present day, there is quite a lot of emphasis on Ecosystems and this is leading companies to become one stop shops. Devices, Software, Microchips, Data, Entertainment and more. I suppose the great CEO’s brief expulsion from his own company and his subsequent entrance into a digital animation company also probably informed the company’s decision to get into film. 

Garry Oldman, Jack Lowden, Christine Scott Thomas, Rosalind Eleazar, Saskia Reeves and Christopher Chung.

As such there is a good list of very well done films including Slow Horses. 

The film’s first triumph is the use of a well chosen list of conflicting characters. Throw in a little office romance, failures in leadership (and repulsion by previous bosses higher up in the food chain), a smart but visibly troubled boss, an older caring secretary and a geeky slightly perverted techie, and you have the recipe for quite a show. 

The story revolves around this team that is cut off from the HQ of British Intelligence for previous wrongs and that has to handle less desirable cases as a means of being redeemed. This rag tag force though, has a super intelligent leader who is not afraid to bend the rules and whose deceptively old age often leads his adversaries to underestimate him. 

There are some stories in the series that are unique episodes but there is a sense of continuity. I have had some discussions about the use of location and sets to invoke certain feelings and this idea seems to be fully utilized with the sharp contrast between small office occupied by this small intelligence force and the large security-filled complex that hosts the HQ of the intelligence office.