State of Play

A few days ago I watched (via netflix) the 2009 movie State of Play which has just come out on DVD. This is a remake of a 2003 BBC miniseries (6 one hour episodes) which I saw (also on DVD via netfix) a while ago.

Both concern a newspaper investigating a scandal triggered by the death of a politician's research assistant who it turns out was also his mistress. There are the usual twists and turns as the reporters dig into the case. I am a bit of a sucker for stories about crusading newspaper reporters battling evil in high places and I liked the BBC miniseries a lot.

I didn't like the movie as much. It started strong but then seemed to lose its way a bit. There was a scene in a parking garage that seemed confusing and unnecessary. Apparently it was in the movie as some sort of homage to a parking garage scene in "All the President's Men" (which I have not seen). This doesn't seem a very good reason for including a scene to me. More generally I thought the movie had trouble compressing 6 hours of material to 2 hours. The final plot twist seemed insufficiently developed.

Of course it is bit hard to be fair to the movie having seen the miniseries first. Still although the movie was ok I thought the miniseries was quite a bit better. So my recommendation would be to watch the miniseries first. You might want to turn subtitles on however as I found some of the English accents hard to follow.