In case you didn't know, warfare is no longer about ace fighter
pilots or troops crawling through muddy battlefields. In today's military,
combat operations are conducted from trailers in the Nevada desert, the
deathblow dealt by an officer's push of a button or swivel of a joystick, but
not until the command has come down from some faceless politician thousands of
miles away. Accountability at either end of the kill order is about as close to
zero as one can get. In case you didn't know any of that, Hollywood has been
making sure to get that point across with multiple films on the proliferation
of drone warfare. Gavin Hood's Eye
in the Sky is just the latest
film to send the familiar warnings, but it does something a little different by
presenting the complicated web of maneuvers it takes before the final call is
made to strike.
The result is a film that is timely,
certainly relevant, but as a thriller it gets bogged down in minutiae that may
be authentic but isn't always entertaining. Screenwriter Guy Hibbert has
delivered a concise yet meaty screenplay which effectively juggles multiple
characters in multiple military and political scenarios. Helen Mirren plays
Commander Katherine Powell, who rigidly leads a joint U.K./U.S. operation to
capture radicalized British terrorist Aisha Al Hady (Lex King) who has joined
up with Al Shabaab. Powell's mission includes drone surveillance piloted by
Steve Watts (Aaron Paul) and his idealistic young partner, Carrie (Phoebe Fox),
holed up in a bunker somewhere in Las Vegas. When the drone reveals that Hady
is meeting up with high-level officers in the terrorist group, the decision to
wipe them all out with an air strike is made. But first it must go through all
of the necessary political channels, which is when Lieutenant General
Frank Benson (the late Alan Rickman) comes in, haggling with different
officials who are all trying to cover their own asses legally while watching
everything unfold live.
If Hibbert and Hood's goal was to show the
culture of bureaucratic stonewalling that comes with these life and death
decisions, then they've more than succeeded. While the "kill" order
has been given, there's collateral damage to consider and much of the film is
spent watching analysts calculate the warhead's blast radius. Lawyers are
called in to figure what the proper rules of engagement are, phone calls are
made to U.S. heads of state who don't seem to much care; the whole thing is a
trainwreck where split-second decisions of military importance go to die. But
in the midst of all this hand-wringing events unfold on the ground where agents
(Oscar-nominee Barkhad Abdi plays one) are putting their lives in danger to
secure the proper intel. Abdi proves to be the film's heart and soul, whose
sure-footed actions to save one potential victim's life injects a bit of sanity
into the process.
To make its point the film does what most
of these drone movies do, and that's posit a situation that is highly
improbable if not downright impossible. And that opens up the door to a great deal
of cornball philosophizing from those on every side of the issue, with all of
them given ample time to make their points very clear. In that kind of
environment, the analytical and the emotional are presented as being constantly
at loggerheads, but that is pretty much the point of what Eye in the Sky is saying, and despite going a little
overboard in saying it, the conversation the film should spark is well worth
it.
Rating: 3 out of 5
