A still from Red Alert, a miniseries based on real events from Oct. 7, 2023.Paramount+/Supplied
Oct. 7 is a date that will go down in history – but it isn’t actually a part of history yet.
The attacks carried out by Hamas and other militant groups in Israel that day in 2023 saw more Jewish people killed than on any other day since the Holocaust, more than 250 hostages taken – and were the spark of the current war in which more than 67,000 Palestinians have died and millions more have been displaced in Gaza.
That boilerplate description is disturbing enough – but the effects have rippled through politics around the world, spilling over into elections and alliances, not to mention families and friend groups.
Red Alert, a new four-part Israeli miniseries releasing this Oct. 7 internationally on Paramount+, is set over approximately six hours on the day itself. Set in motion in December, 2023, the project arrives on screen both too close and too far from the events to provide any valuable new perspective into them. Its feel-good focus will please exactly no one.
Created by Lior Chefetz and Ruth Efroni, the telescoped, almost real-time drama provides a sanitized, easily digestible version of the violence and chaos, zeroing in on four stories of individual heroism.
The lead characters are a counterterrorism officer who embarks on an against-the-odds journey to save his police-officer wife at the Nova Music Festival; a retired kindergarten teacher in Ofakim who turns her car into an ambulance; a Palestinian permanent resident who ends up hiding with his baby son at a crossroads; and a family of five who initially shelter in a safe room in their house on Kibbutz Nir Oz.
According to an on-screen disclaimer at the beginning of each episode, the series is based on real events, with some names changed and some scenes imagined.
The story of the pseudonymous Kobi (Israel Atias) making his way to the Nova Music Festival is the least effective the longer it stretches on and the more it takes on the trappings and cliché beats of an action movie. Atias has movie-star good looks – and gets to take out a couple of militants with AK-47s from a distance with a handgun. The writers try to add suspense by deking viewers out that he or his wife has died.
When Kobi warns a group of armed companions of the dangers of accompanying him on the last stretch of his journey, one replies: “A ton of terrorists? Then let’s kill ‘em!”
By contrast, the most compelling, genuinely human plot line follows the real-life Yahalomi family.
Rotem Sela, centre, as Bat Sheva Yahalomi and Libi Atia as Yael.Paramount+/Supplied
It’s striking to see how casually mother, father and children set up shop in a fortified safe room to play UNO when “red alert” starts blasting on their kibbutz’s loudspeakers. (The ways the characters in all the plots have a relaxed familiarity with firearms gives you a peek at what peace looks like in this society.)
Playing the real-life mother Bat Sheva Yahalomi, Rotem Sela gives an astonishing performance as her character has to make terrible decisions in an instant, regarding the fate of her husband and children.
Children in peril is something Red Alert foregrounds right from its first scene – which opens with Ayub (Hisham Suleiman), a Muslim Palestinian born in Gaza who lives in Israel, hiding with his baby.
The first episode depicts the shooting death of his pregnant wife at a crossroads – her blood splattering onto their son in the back seat.
That’s the series’s most graphic moment, though it’s not particularly gory. Red Alert otherwise shies away from showing anything too extreme – depicting most deaths from a distance that is both respectful and also a little too much like a video game.
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The horror is better shown through a constant string of terrified text messages that land on characters’ phones. The texts seem most shocked not by the attack, but that the Israeli army is not there to defend them from it.
Still, Red Alert is, surprisingly, not difficult viewing. Atrocities, disputed or not, are elided.
A press kit from Paramount+ about Red Alert reads: “The series does not go near politics or the war that has raged since. Instead, it concentrates on ordinary citizens whose lives were forever changed that day.”
Not going near politics is a form of politics, of course – and the end sequence where we read on screen about what has happened to the real people who inspired the characters on screen shatters the present-tense pretense.
Viewers will learn how three characters subsequently “completed their military service and travelled the world.”
The most recent Angus Reid poll on the subject showed 52 per cent of Canadians believe Israel is committing genocide in the war in Gaza – and those Canadian viewers may feel their stomachs turn at that blithe summary of ensuing events.
But other Canadian viewers – probably, the 25 per cent polled who believe Israel is not committing genocide – will likely have already been turned off by the TV-friendly sanitization of Oct. 7 itself.