Ten Days to Zero

Linking national and international politics, third-world exploitation and smart investigation with a dramatic kidnap and told with a mix of narratives and a variety of documents (memos, transcripts and logs), this is an exciting story which attempts to be a bit more thoughtful. Ben Maddox is the young go-getting reporter for Zephon TV who stumbles upon the kidnap while looking into why this government should suddenly want to appease an island government who are attempting to dispossess their own sugar cane workers. It’s the stuff of the television thriller: fast editing, cutting between the various texts, and stories, the flashiness of the television world, the use of technology and the very solid detail of facts overlying a fast-paced story of investigation. While the characterisation is thin, using stereotypes, often of looks, age and occupation as easy signals and the ending seems unnecessarily abrupt, what has led up to it is lively in its detail and in the neat jigsawing together of stories and facts. AJ