This miniature Jason Bourne is a family thriller
As a child reader, the two most thrilling manners of death in my mind were sinking in quicksand – thank you, Enid Blyton – and falling down a lift shaft. So imagine my delight when an early scene in Alex Rider (Amazon Prime Video) featured a man stepping through the doors of a lift and… whoops, there he goes!
Amazon has turned Anthony Horowitz’s bestselling books about a teenage secret agent into a pacy romp, far superior to the 2006 film. It’s slick and stylish, bringing the stories up-to-date with smartphones and cybertechnology while sticking to the spirit of Boy’s Own adventures. (Alex can pick locks with a paper clip – I’m sure that’s another Famous Five trick.) The target market is teenagers but it avoids a children’s TV feel – albeit the torture scenes stick to drenching Alex in water and bombarding him with death metal while he’s tied to a chair, rather than anything more gruesome.
Alex, played by Otto Farrant (23 years old but a pretty convincing teenager), is an orphan who lives with his “boring banker” uncle (Andrew Buchan of Broadchurch fame) and caring housekeeper (Ronke Adekoluejo). Except it turns out that Uncle Ian was actually a spy, whose murder in episode one leads to Alex being recruited by the shadowy arm of the intelligence agency and getting Line of Duty’s Vicky Mcclure as his handler. As a reference point for a modern audience, it’s neat that Alex discovers the truth about his uncle by using a Find My Phone app.
Alex is tasked with infiltrating Point Blanc, a sinister Alpine academy for the offspring of billionaires. We don’t see him get there until midway through the series. Before that point, Alex has to go through training, although he already has some handy fight skills and can scale buildings with ease, while also doing normal schoolboy stuff: hanging out with his beanie-hatted best friend and trying to chat to girls.
The show is made for a global audience but makes good use of its London locations, from cherry tree-lined streets to housing estates and an obligatory shot of the Shard, rather than being generic. With its chase scenes and interrogations, it’s a junior version of the Jason Bourne franchise, but one that can also keep adults entertained.
Did you hear the one about how President Obama was going to turn all the Walmarts in Texas into detention centres for political dissidents? Or the one about the Washington DC pizza and ping-pong restaurant that housed a child sex ring linked to Hillary Clinton?
You may be able to spot that both of these stories are conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, plenty of people cannot. After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News (Sky Documentaries) was a well-researched and depressing look at how and why such stories spread online.
The ‘Pizzagate’ conspiracy began life as a post on the Reddit site, after the emails of Clinton’s campaign chairman were hacked. It suggested that references to pizza were coded messages about child pornography. A restaurant mentioned in the emails was bombarded with threats, and the campaign culminated with a man so convinced of the story’s truth that he burst into the place armed with a rifle, shooting his way through a door at the back to rescue the imagined sex slaves. It was a coat cupboard.
There was no such end to the Texas story, but it was equally dispiriting to see how people could be taken in. The rumours sprung up around a military training exercise taking place in the state. The local mayor called a townhall meeting at which a man from the army patiently explained what was going on. A member of the crowd stood up and told him he didn’t believe a word of it, to much applause.
And so it goes on. Film-maker Andrew Rossi did a good job of mapping out how these stories are fuelled by the alt-right. They were ridiculous figures – you had to laugh at Jacob Wohl, whose attempt to stage a press conference smearing FBI director Robert Mueller was so inept, it could have been a spoof documentary – but Facebook and others allow them to spread their theories unchecked.
It’s tempting to say that everyone who falls for fake news is stupid, yet of course that’s not true. How can people discern “fake news” or not when President Trump uses it to describe any stories about himself that he doesn’t like? “People are starting to make their own truth and honestly I’m OK with that,” said one alt-right Youtube star. A disturbing prospect.
Alex Rider ★★★★ After Truth ★★★★