When it comes to scripted storytelling about unfathomable tragedy, immediacy is rarely an asset.
It’s different for documentaries — immediacy and urgency can sometimes be the entire point — but narrative features or series about tragic events usually require the passage of some time to allow for perspective and development. Even then, I’m not sure if there’s a defining piece of scripted media about 9/11 some 24 years later, while I can easily point to 15 or 20 movies and TV shows that tried to tackle 9/11 sooner and failed miserably.
Red Alert
The Bottom Line
Calculated, but intense and focused.
Airdate: Tuesday, October 7 (Paramount+)
Cast: Rotem Sela, Israel Atias, Miki Leon, Hisham Sulliman, Chen Amsalem, Rotem Abuhab, Sara Vino, Nevo Katan
Creator: Lior Chefetz
If you have to tell the story of a tragedy in its near aftermath, I guess a key to success is razor-sharp focus. Paul Greengrass’ United 93 assumes that viewers will bring their own context; the movie is a 110-minute unrelenting nightmare that accepts that countless stories from that day could be told and this is just one of them, with no aspirations of opening up its world. It doesn’t give backstories for every passenger. It doesn’t show the terrorists learning to fly the planes. It also knows that many viewers won’t want to or won’t be able to watch a story with this focus, and that’s okay.
Lior Chefetz’s Red Alert, one of two high-profile Israeli-produced scripted projects premiering on the anniversary of the October 7 terror attacks (and the only one to send screeners to critics), aims to work on a far more emotional level than United 93.
Airing on Paramount+ and Channel 12 in Israel, it’s fundamentally propagandistic and calculated to yield very visceral and sentimental responses. On that level, it works pretty thoroughly and I was a mess by the fourth and final episode, despite being consistently aware of every string being pulled and every tear being jerked.
But what it also does is keep its vision aggressively and smartly blindered. It tells four stories within Israel from the morning of October 7, culled from a tight six-hour factual window, sticking to a real-time-esque structure in its first couple of episodes and only cheating the timeline with a few flashbacks to the day before the attacks. It doesn’t ask “What were the terrorists thinking?” or “How did the Israeli government and intelligence services blow this so badly?” or “Does this morally justify what came next?” The assumption is that viewers will bring their own answers to those questions — and that for myriad reasons, the series will be unwatchable for some audiences and a tough watch for everybody.
I’m honestly not quite sure which audience is going to crave a series like Red Alert, but I can vouch that despite occasional irritatingly visible attempts to evoke response, it’s breathlessly effective.
The four stories capture four different October 7 experiences and four different versions of heroism (or maybe five stories and five versions of heroism, but two are connected).
We’re introduced to counterterrorism team leader Kobi (Israel Atias) doing undercover security work at the Nova Festival, mostly halting the spread of party drugs. Just as dawn’s breaking, Kobi leaves the festival, sharing a brief moment with wife Nofar (Chen Amsalem), a fellow police officer. Kobi goes home, while Nofar is at the Festival when the Hamas terrorists attack. Nofar has to help the festivalgoers, many wounded and all scared, while Kobi barely makes it home before he has to turn around to try to save his wife.
Ayoub (Hisham Sulliman), a Gazan living in Israel and unable to get any legal identification papers, is driving his wife to work, along with his very young son and two migrant laborers they picked up on the road. At the Ma’On Junction, Ayoub’s car encounters a terrorist convoy, with tragic results.
At the Nir Oz kibbutz, Ohad (Miki Leon), wife Batsheva (Rotem Sela) and three children are awoken by alarms and seek refuge in their home’s shelter room, which unfortunately has a broken door, forcing a predictable and harrowing outcome.
In a nearby village, Tali (Sara Vino) and her grown kids also go into their shelter room. When it becomes clear what is happening, son Itamar (Nevo Katan), a soldier, grabs his gun and goes running out to help, with Tali trying to find him and bring him back to safety.
Red Alert is manipulative, as is clearest in two storylines in which suspense is built over whether or not a baby is going to cry. But it’s not sensationalistic — or at least it’s less sensationalistic than it could be, which isn’t always a clear distinction.
If you’ve seen the Hamas-streamed footage from October 7, you’ve seen material far more graphic than anything depicted in Red Alert, crimes far more repugnant, celebrated with far more inhuman enthusiasm by the perpetrators. For large stretches, the violence in Red Alert takes place just off-screen. There are sequences in two panic rooms and one roadside shelter, during which our heroes are waiting and listening to variations in the sound design. The characters understand the audible differences between rockets, interceptor defensive technology, automatic gunfire and regular gunfire, and Chefetz is at his subtlest when he lets non-Israeli viewers learn the differences through the increasingly terrified reactions.
Even when several characters shift into full action mode — marked by uncomfortably intimate handheld camerawork and an annoying but not inexplicable over-reliance on drone footage — glimpses of burnt cars and bloodied bodies are kept to a minimum. It’s enough to horrify the characters, and audiences at home, but nowhere near the scale of reality. Chefetz makes fleeting use of actual surveillance cam footage, but not the streamed Hamas imagery; I found it highly effective the first time we see the images shot at Ma’On Junction on that day, but it’s not a technique Chefetz commits to consistently. If you’re not sticking with the choice, might as well not have bothered with it.
The show’s treatment of violence is a choice as well, and while it mostly leans into restraint, that isn’t always the case. There’s at least one shot in which a character shoots a terrorist and the camera lingers voyeuristically to make sure we see spurts of blood pumping from the ravaged skull. Later, far less graphically but more extendedly, Kobi’s attempt to get back to Nofar leads him to an automatic weapon. He proceeds to take out a string of terrorists with a perspective that resembles a first-person video game, dispatching one faceless Hamas terrorist after another in a wholly and intentionally dehumanizing process.
In all, only one terrorist is given a name and more than one line of dialogue, so I’m not even sure what the point was in bothering with that, either. It’s one thing to accept that this is not Hamas’ story and that they shouldn’t be humanized in this context, but why include the lone second-rate 24-style caricature as a bad guy?
Ayoub’s character is present as a token Good Arab in Israel, a very limited acknowledgement of such people’s sub-standard legal status. The character, whose most frequent scene partner is a baby, is noticeably and irksomely underwritten, but Fauda veteran Sulliman is so good that he’s able to overcome the impression that Ayoub is a pre-emptive response to criticism rather than a person.
As much as the action, which is tightly cut and usually alternates confidently between characters frantically on-the-move and other characters huddled in claustrophobic spaces, the storylines are held together by the performances.
Vino initially makes Tali seem like a stereotypically needy and critical Jewish mother, but the character gets the show’s best individual arc, going from borderline comic to wildly inspiring.
In the Nir Oz storyline, Leon’s Ohab is introduced as the protagonist, but it’s Sela and especially breakout juvenile actress Atia who sell the devastating choices and impact of that impossible day.
Atias and Amsalem make the most of their limited paired scenes to exhibit a chemistry sufficient to sell a love story between two separated partners. Mostly, they persuade us that each character has something they’re determined to live for. Although Kobi and Nofar apparently have three kids, they’re kept entirely off-screen because otherwise the stories would all be “parents willing to do whatever it takes for their kids.” Some variation is helpful.
Generally, Red Alert benefits from how contained its storytelling is. Four episodes of roughly 45 minutes apiece is exactly the right amount for viewer concentration to remain intact, for full and undistracted investment to build in characters either hiding in terror, racing around performing mitzvahs under horrifying circumstances, playing action hero or just walking across a field, trying to stay alive.
The characters are all based, to different extents, on real people. I don’t always love the inevitable “show footage of the real people over the closing credits” strategy in traditional biopics, but I found it powerful here. Even if parts of the individual storylines still come across as contrived or at least dramatically convenient, the ending reminds and underlines that these things, and things far worse, happened in Israel on October 7, 2023. What came after needs to be reckoned with, perhaps requiring more distance to attain perspective. But Red Alert wants you to remember October 7.
