NETFLIX’S NEW CHURCHILL DOCUMENTARY: Churchill at War review: superficial primer is tailor-made for US audiences.
Every decent historical documentary series these days needs a gimmick to set it apart from the rest. Churchill at War (Netflix) arguably has three. The four-part series, which skims over Winston Churchill’s early life before giving us a highlights package of the Second World War, features a battalion of wonderfully restored and colourised wartime footage. Not a new trick, perhaps, but a good one.
Its second flourish, befitting a series produced by Hollywood big dogs Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, is to assemble a mighty war cabinet of talking heads. Not only do we have the expected coterie of historians, but a former British prime minister (Boris Johnson), a former US president (George W Bush) and the current British foreign secretary (David Lammy). This trio adds tremendous value.
At the very beginning of the first episode, Boris Johnson tells an unseen interviewer, “Churchill believed in freedom, free speech, democracy. Those ideals are not uncontested today — far from it.”
Does the Boris of 2024 remember the Boris of 2020? Boris Johnson Missed His Churchill Moment.
When Johnson’s idol, Winston Churchill, first came to power in 1940, France was in the process of falling to Nazi Germany. Most of the other great European powers had already fallen. For a time, Britain stood alone in the world, the sole defender of the West, with Churchill at its helm. Even when his own ministers urged him to accept Hitler’s peace offer, Churchill held firm to his convictions and chose to fight on.
This is the laudable mantle that Johnson has, all his life, aspired to shoulder. He faced just such a defining moment in March of 2020. The entire world had surrendered to the People’s Republic of China, adopting its totalitarian disease-control strategy, and unlike France or Poland in World War II, we surrendered without a shot being fired. If any man in the world was well-positioned to stand against this, it was the garrulous British renegade, Boris Johnson.
Instead, the United Kingdom became a police state.
“Freedom, free speech, democracy. Those ideals are not uncontested today — far from it.”