Tale of bombing is designed to rattle

“Dirty War,” airing on HBO tonight, depicts to convincing effect a terrorist bombing at rush hour in central London that kills scores of people and sends a billowing cloud of toxic smoke over a city only partially equipped to deal with the chaotic aftermath.

Could it happen here? I don’t mean another terrorist event -- I mean a movie that seeks to rattle us out of a complacent belief that the terrorism front is exclusively “over there” now (Iraq, Afghanistan, Madrid, Istanbul) and not also on the verge of happening again in our own backyard. Sensing that audiences want their terror to remain vicarious, TV networks offer up a barrage of case-solving dramas that don’t extend to the subject of terrorism. Too real; stick to serial killers, or reenacting, as E! Entertainment Television will with the upcoming molestation trial of Michael Jackson.

To that end, “Dirty War,” a coproduction with the BBC, whose public affairs unit researched the background for this dramatization, argues that what we don’t know will hurt us, and soon. It means to rattle and awaken awareness about the so-called “war on terror” in the way that “The Day After,” the 1983 TV movie about a nuclear holocaust in the U.S., sought to get viewers thinking harder about the implications of the Cold War nukes race. “Dirty War” is this kind of cautionary tale, although not as catastrophic; it’s an isolated tale about the shadowy ways in which terrorist cells operate and how elusive the enemy is to those charged with protecting us.

In this way, “Dirty War” leads us to the edge of our fears about another 9/11 (or 3/11, which is what Spaniards call the commuter train bombings in Madrid last spring). You will feel things watching “Dirty War” -- dread, certainly, and anger perhaps at the ways in which a government is shown keeping its people blissfully in the dark, but “Dirty War” doesn’t go beyond showing what can happen, and how.

It’s well-executed but almost too clinical for its own good. “Based on extensive factual research,” as the film announces, “Dirty War” takes viewers inside the week leading up to the explosion of a “dirty bomb” -- low-grade radioactive material dispersed by a conventional explosive -- outside a Tube station during morning rush hour. As it cuts back and forth among various worlds, the film juxtaposes the resolve and efficiency of a clandestine network of Islamic extremists with the frustrations and squabbling among authorities trying to catch a remarkably unseen enemy.

“Dirty War” begins with a botched emergency services drill, one whose failure doesn’t prevent the minister of London (Helen Schlesinger) from spinning it as proof of London being equipped to handle a terrorist act -- a pronouncement that enrages a fire chief (Alastair Galbraith). Meanwhile, a Jordanian militant (William El-Gardi) is moving toward the final stages of a suicide plot. Over at Scotland Yard, two detectives in the antiterrorism unit (Koel Purie and Martin Savage) are piecing together the various tentacles of the terrorist operation.

Reduced to a description of its plot elements, “Dirty War” sounds a lot more boilerplate than it actually is. In fact, the film, directed by Daniel Percival and co-written with Lizzie Mickery, builds with a gravity rarely undermined by cheesy dialogue, a typical trap of this kind of piece. Rather, the details of the unfolding event provide the film’s momentum and, ultimately, the horrifyingly convincing nature of its outcome.

PBS will air “Dirty War” Feb. 23, though a brief scene of frontal nudity during a decontamination scrub-down scene will be excised from the broadcast. A PBS official said the network didn’t want to risk an indecency fine from the Federal Communications Commission, no doubt a pragmatic move but also a strange argument given how far from sexualized the moment is.

On Tuesday, also on PBS stations, “Frontline” airs a piece called “Al Qaeda’s New Front,” about the rise of radical Islam in Western Europe, where Muslims generally are a larger minority than they are here and can live with fewer concerns about assimilation. The relative openness of Western Europe has also made it an easy target for Al Qaeda, an organization so diffuse as to be unrecognizable. Europe, the program shows, has become a breeding ground for future jihadis. What we learn isn’t new, just more dread-producing and anger-inspiring, no matter your point of view. President Bush may not have mentioned the word “terrorism” in his inaugural speech last week while saying “free” or “freedom” more than 25 times, but, as “Frontline” and “Dirty War” demonstrate, that’s a head-in-the-sand place to be.

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‘Dirty War’

Where: HBO

When: 9 p.m.

Ratings: TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17)

Alastair Galbraith...Murray Corrigan

Helen Schlesinger...Nicola Painswick

Louise Delamere...Liz Corrigan

Ewan Stewart...John Ives

Koel Purie...Sameena Habibullah

Executive producers Liza Marshall, David Thompson, Paul Woolwich. Director Daniel Percival. Writers Daniel Percival, Lizzie Mickery.