‘War’ HBO Max Review: The One Percent Have a Miserable Time in a Slick Legal Thriller Where Every Feeling Has a Price Tag

A divorce trial can be complicated for any mere mortal, but when you’re dealing with a pair of multimillionaires like the couple at the center of War, things can get downright savage. Sure, we’re talking about a few million more for one side or the other, as if there were much difference between walking away with $100 million or $150 million, but the problem here goes well beyond the gains or losses of the two parties. There’s an entire ecosystem —legal, mostly, but not exclusively— looking to take its cut from this high-stakes dance of money. It’s clear that the series, created by George Kay, the showrunner behind Lupin and Hijack, does not represent the experience of ordinary people, but there’s something fascinating about watching the “one percent” have a pretty miserable time, at least once in a while.

It all starts with a trap. A complicated, questionable and possibly illegal one, but also a reckless and potentially brutal one. Morgan Henderson (Dominic West, the actor from The Wire and The Crown) is the CEO of a multibillion-dollar tech company who is receiving an award from his peers. A young woman (Rose Williams) stares at him from the audience, walks out of the event toward the same hotel he is heading to, gets into the same elevator and, when they reach his floor, stands there staring at him. Morgan tries to ignore the situation. She leaves the door to her room open, he eventually walks in, and you know where this is going. Except that the next morning, she is taking pictures of him in bed and sending them to Carla Duval (Sienna Miller), the famous actress who is her friend and, more importantly, Morgan’s wife.

The affair is the excuse, the match that sets the divorce proceedings in motion. Carla consults a law firm and, while they tell her that the “honey trap” would not hold up in court, they also know it is better to have the material than not have it. In any divorce involving famous people, public opinion matters as much as, if not more than, the truth. And those photographs could be crucial when it comes to the British tabloid press. Morgan and his lawyers realize that the woman is planning to file against him, so they beat her to it and file first, in a way that bears an uncomfortable resemblance to an actual divorce case. Very quickly, the situation becomes tense and complicated. From there, a series of negotiations and mediations will serve mainly as preparation for the final battle.

War is structured as an anthology series, one that changes its story from season to season while keeping the same central theme. And this isn’t really a series about a divorce. It’s a series about lawyers, with each season following a different explosive case. That means the other major protagonists are sitting on opposite sides of the table. On Carla’s side —a once hugely famous actress going through a period of scarce work— is a young firm called Taylor & Byrne, run by Nick and Serena (James McArdle and Phoebe Fox), a pregnant couple with a sizable team of people working exclusively on this case. Morgan, meanwhile, is represented by the more traditional and long-established Cathcarts, run with considerable cunning by veteran lawyers St. John (Pip Torrens) and Beatrice (Nina Sosanya), who have an equally substantial team behind them.

War is concerned with the couple at the center of the case, but just as much with the lawyers and their strategies. And while Carla has a potentially useful weapon in those photographs, Morgan’s lawyers have an even more powerful —and secret— card up their sleeve. His name is Johnny (Archie Renaux), a young lawyer who, after struggling to find a job, ends up in a rather unusual situation: he works for Taylor & Byrne while secretly spying for their rivals. That gives them, at least initially, a major advantage when it comes to gathering information for the negotiations and the potential trial.

The series gradually introduces other elements, including Carla’s teenage son (played by Aran Murphy, Cillian Murphy’s son, who can also be seen in Youth), backstories involving both of them and, above all, the biggest bone of contention: they signed a prenuptial agreement, but Carla and her lawyers are trying to have it invalidated on the grounds that it was signed long before Morgan became as wealthy as he is now. By piling on complications, tricks, traps, unexpected romances, betrayals and a whole lot of money, War turns a divorce drama into something closer to a thriller than a story driven by any kind of genuine emotion.

Despite the coldness and artificiality surrounding Morgan and Carla, both together and apart, the series is smart enough not to portray them as outright monsters. They are, yes, people who put their feelings aside and try to calculate every move in order to gain a financial advantage, but they can’t always manage it because certain remnants of humanity keep surfacing here and there, often making their lawyers’ carefully constructed strategies even more complicated. They are the kind of couple who can agree to put their child in the middle of their dispute, only to break down or regret it afterward.

Something similar happens with the lawyers, people whose strategies you can understand but who are also, it is clear, motivated by the desire to walk away with as much money as possible from what is, essentially, a business built around these two clients. And then there’s the entire ecosystem surrounding them, eagerly stepping into the middle of the dispute in the hope that, wherever a dollar happens to fall, they’ll be there to pick it up. A particularly cruel scene in the third episode makes that abundantly clear. Feelings and emotions may matter to these people, but a wad of cash, an obscenely expensive watch or a Savile Row suit matter more. And if somebody has to suffer to get them, so be it.