Summary
Forensically detailed, mature, and balanced, Attack on London: Hunting the 7/7 Bombers should be mandatory viewing.
Over the years, Netflix has earned a deserved reputation for sensationalism. You need only have a quick browse through the true-crime thumbnails to see some of the most egregious examples of reducing very serious subjects to their most salacious constituent parts. But the tide seems to be turning. Grenfell: Uncovered was a superb, human-first documentary that knew the testimony of the survivors – and the families of the victims – was equally as important, if not more so, than the gross and expansive systemic negligence that led to the disaster. And Attack on London: Hunting the 7/7 Bombers, a four-part limited series rather than a feature film, is very much the same.
We’re on the cusp of the twentieth anniversary of the 2005 attacks on the London transport system, but its relevance has never waned in the interim. This was the first suicide bombing on British soil and led to the largest criminal investigation in British history. These two things get to the heart of the series, which impressively leverages the shock and confusion caused by the initial attack and the sprawling, forensic manhunt that followed. But it’s interspersed with an excellent balance of first-hand testimony and relevant diversions to establish political and cultural context; these attacks, after all, didn’t occur in a vacuum.
But all this aside, the visceral impact of the series can’t be overstated. Much like American Manhunt: Osama Bin Laden, Attack on London takes an expertly cinematic approach to fact-based documentary filmmaking, using phone footage, news broadcasts from the time, published photographs, and sometimes dramatic reconstructions to detail the events which killed 52 people and injured more than 700. Most of the first episode is devoted to emphasising the panic and confusion of those initial attacks – remember, it was unprecedented that someone on the London Underground would simply blow themselves up – through interviews with survivors, including Daniel Biddle, a man who was sitting opposite a terrorist at Edgware Road. The “reveal” when the camera eventually pulls back a little here is harrowing, but expertly done.
Quickly, an investigation is underway, and it’s the scale and scope of this process that threads through all four episodes as they delve into the fallout of 7/7, the failed attacks on July 21, the police shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, a suspect later revealed to be innocent, and to the eventual capture of Yasin Hassan Omar, among others. The scale is truly impressive, and the granular detail of how puzzling, never-before-seen forensic details led to unprecedented investigatory techniques is fascinating stuff.
But it’s not, crucially, fascinating for its own sake. Attack on London: Hunting the 7/7 Bombers is not a self-congratulatory work of Great British jingoism. It doesn’t have that ooh-rah streak of nationalism that the American Manhunt series did. In fact, it dares to ask the question of Tony Blair, who features here like Theresa May in Grenfell: Uncovered in a one-two punch of Netflix compelling former British Prime Ministers to answer awkward questions, whether the 2003 invasion of Iraq was at least partially responsible for the attacks.
It also speaks to the cultural repercussions, which have become increasingly relevant as time has gone on. Mustafa Kurtuldu, who was on the tube near Aldgate when the train blew up, was asked outright on national television a few days later how he feels about the attacks as a practising Muslim. It was clear then that even some of the victims would be treated as suspects, a theme which continues throughout and perhaps culminates in the death of a 27-year-old Brazilian electrician shot ostensibly for “looking edgy”, though almost certainly not for that reason exclusively (one of the officers who shot him speaks in the series, his identity obscured for obvious reasons.)
Among all this, the human element is never forgotten about, and the survivors and their relatives are constantly returned to. The cost of such an attack is indescribably high, and Attack on London does a remarkable job of reminding us. It’s superb, balanced, mature documentary filmmaking, and essential viewing.
