War Episode 1 Review: A Mundane Start Saved by a Wild Twist

The new series War kicks off with a story about a high profile divorce between tech mogul Morgan Henderson and actress Carla Duval. While the show frames their split as a battlefield, the first episode spends most of its time on a slow setup that feels uninspired. Dominic West is excellent as the entitled Morgan, but Sienna Miller feels underused as Carla despite her strong performance. Meanwhile, the show focuses heavily on a struggling lawyer named Johnny, though his character suffers from too much exposition and not enough actual development.

For the first forty minutes, the show feels like a typical legal drama that we have all seen before. It is not necessarily bad, but it lacks excitement. However, the final ten minutes feature a shocking twist that completely shifts the tone. Suddenly, the series moves away from a standard court case and promises a much more intense narrative involving espionage, infiltration, and psychological warfare between the legal teams.

It is hard to say if the show will maintain this momentum, but that final reveal certainly makes the second episode worth watching. War has a lot of work ahead to prove it is more than just a average legal story, but it has officially caught our attention. You can catch new episodes of War streaming on HBO Max every Thursday.