Eye in the Sky review: 'Helen Mirren joins the drones debate'
Telegraph
Tim Robey 12 September 2015 • 1:00am
Actors: Aaron Paul, Alan Rickman, Helen Mirren, Barkhad Abdi
Director: Gavin Hood
Genre: Drama, Thriller, War
Synopsis: A terror-targeting drone mission becomes a flashpoint when a civilian girl enters the kill zone
Release Date 2015
Duration 102 min
Rating TBC
Country UK, USA
Drone warfare, top of the political hot-potato pile after last week’s British attack in Syria, is one of the more unignorable debating points of our age – one with such urgent, palpable, life-or-death application that cinema is beginning to wake up to it. Gavin Hood’s air-strike thriller Eye in the Sky isn’t the first film to tackle this – there was April's Ethan Hawke-starrer Good Kill, which focused more on the psychological fallout of point-and-click soldiering than the impact on the ground.
Lasering in with its sights, Eye in the Sky gives us a single theatre of war – a shantytown in Nairobi, where suicide bombers may be ensconced – and runs the numbers. Guy Hibbert’s punchy, almost real-time script begins with British army colonel Katharine Powell (a camo-clad Helen Mirren, giving us a stern military variation on Jane Tennison) calling the shots. A dissident she’s been tracking for years is pinpointed to this one hut, which is uncomfortably close to various innocent civilians going about their day.
Captain Phillips’s Barkhad Abdi plays a Somali anti-terror agent on the ground, tasked with getting close enough to send in a spy camera, attached to a remote-controlled “insect drone”, and thereby allowing his colleagues to have a literal fly on the wall. The critical moment nears. And, just then, a young Kenyan girl sets out her bread stall within feet of the blast radius.
The arguments – to strike, or not to strike – zing back and forth in Westminster, where Lt Gen Frank Benson (Alan Rickman) more or less backs Mirren’s view that the risk is worth taking. The defence department need legality reinforced, pushing this decision up the chain of command.
Alas, the Foreign Secretary (Iain Glen) is away in Singapore, and in a subplot of rather dicey comic charge, is having to deal with an attack of IBS at the same time. More satirically effective is the swift call made to the US Secretary of State, in mid-ping-pong with the Chinese – his instant hot take being bafflement that anyone hesitated or even bothered him.
Shot largely in Hood’s native South Africa, this is a better film than either his manipulative, Oscar-winning Tsotsi (2005) or the confused and underpowered Rendition (2007), which confronted the equally hot-button topic of the CIA abducting terror suspects.
Here the plotting is clean, and the ethical quagmire mapped out clearly. Almost too clearly. Everyone involved has multiple agendas: careers and reputations are at stake, public culpability and personal guilt need to be assuaged. Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul, as an American drone pilot, comes close to disobeying Mirren’s direct orders so that he can at least feel he’s doing the right thing.
If hearing Mirren bark dialogue along the lines of “Only two Hellfires? Where are my GBU12s?” sounds like your idea of fun, there’s a fair bit of that, even though her character is just one piece of the puzzle here, rather than queen bee (although she certainly cuts a dash in her army fatigues). The first of two films she has playing in Toronto – we’ll later see her playing the Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper in Trumbo – this is the rare vehicle where her brusque authority feels subservient to the script, rather than the other way round.
Scraps of characterisation are dropped in the urgent fray: picking up a talking doll for his daughter en route to work, there's a Rickman moment for the ages when he reads out its features (“You will hear her babbling as soon as it is beddy-byes??”).
Beyond these sideshows and plenty of shrewd work from the cast, the film’s serious intent is honourable, and the construction pretty solid. In homing in on the fate of a single innocent child, it wants to humanise a debate which could easily get lost in statistics and probabilities. It makes us well aware of this on screen: the risk assessments which keep being crunched and recrunched to boost the legal case involve point-and-click fudging of the blast radius to make “the numbers work”, when the only number that counts is how many loaves of bread this girl still has left to shift before she gets out of the danger-zone.
If there’s a downside, it’s that you come away feeling everything has been tidily debated, diligently turned over, to the point where there’s not a great deal left to think about. The truth is, drone warfare would be a good deal less troubling if we could believe this level of weepy agonising was involved among the personnel conducting it. Eye in the Sky is a tick-tock suspense exercise as well as a neat little ethical echo chamber, a plea for reason in a world exploding too vigorously to give it the time of day.
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Eye In The Sky Review [TIFF 2015]
By Darren Ruecker 2 days ago
Review of: Eye In The Sky Review [TIFF 2015]
Reviewed by: Darren Ruecker
Rating: 4.5
On September 11, 2015
Last modified:September 11, 2015
Summary:
Eye in the Sky presents a talented ensemble of differing perspectives on the controversial use of drone missiles, forcing us to confront our own feelings about the complicated implications of modern warfare.
One thought kept repeating in my mind over and over again while watching Eye in the Sky: criticism, while important, is incredibly easy. Sitting back and critiquing the decisions or work of another person is virtually always done from a position of security. Arguments made by critics should be made and received with the understanding that sitting outside of a particular situation and passing judgment is a completely different exercise than being in the middle of that situation, having to make difficult decisions with actual stakes behind them, bearing responsibility for outcomes that can actually affect any number of people. This is certainly applicable to the relationship between film critic and filmmaker; it’s also one of the ideas running throughout this movie.
The film centers on a decision surrounding a drone strike. This is one of those hot button issues that generate a lot of opinions, but this is a story that puts us in the rooms with the people who are in the position to make these types of life-or-death decisions. The first clever conceit that is apparent in the superb screenplay by Guy Hibbert is to make it an ensemble film, a depiction of the fact that each decision to deploy a drone strike is indeed a long series of decisions, made by a large number of different people at different levels of legal, military, and government status.
The story follows a British-led operation spearheaded by Colonel Powell (Helen Mirren) meant to capture a suspected British-born terrorist in Nairobi. When surveillance reveals a suicide attack is imminent, Powell calls for a hellfire strike on the terror group’s headquarters, but the process to authorize such a strike proves complicated, exponentially so when a young girl enters into the collateral damage zone.
The result is a tremendous mix of a morality play and a comedy of errors, 12 Angry Men meets Dr. Strangelove. On one hand, there’s American drone operator Steve Watts, played by Aaron Paul. Anyone who’s seen Breaking Bad is familiar with Paul’s capacity for expressing the most heart-wrenching anguish over life-and-death moral quandaries—he’s devastating here again.
On the other hand, there’s UK Foreign Secretary James Willett, played by Iain Glen, who is forced into the middle of this dilemma while suffering through a nasty bit of food poisoning, like something out of an Armando Iannucci series, getting briefed on the situation from the bathroom. The levity of Glen’s role (as well as the US Foreign Secretary who is briefly shown playing table tennis in China and is baffled by the British hesitation to fire missiles) offers some brief gallows humor to relieve what is otherwise an intense narrative.
In addition to playing within these genres, this is also a ticking time bomb narrative, which provides an opportunity for some dynamic crosscutting sequences that play with the broad scope of this story. We get a glimpse of the ground level action, with Barkhad Abdi providing high-tech surveillance for those watching on screens, and among those watching on screens we get the fictional equivalent of the room in which that famous photo of the Bin Laden raid was taken—the type of photograph that one would assume provided visual inspiration for this type of scene on some level. In the upstairs level, far removed from the action, bureaucrats take turns offering arguments for and against a strike, each rationalizing their arguments from different perspectives and principles.
Alan Rickman gives a stoic performance as the military general advising in favor of the strike, while others, such as the attorney general, induce eye-rolls from the audience as they keep trying to pass the responsibility for the decision on to one another. It seems reasonable to feel conflicted about it all; decisions like this with such dire implications ought to be made with checks and balances providing necessary deliberation, but also require a timely decision. This conflictedness is certainly comfortable from a position of removal, and makes for some bemused chuckles and gasps of disapproval, but that’s a luxury these characters can’t afford in the moment, which makes the drama here so captivating.
There’s some delicious irony in the war room’s concern with the optics of the situation when we, in the audience, are watching them deliberate over this operation, and judging them for some of their petty motivations. At the same time, and to the film’s credit, there’s sympathy to be had for every perspective represented. We feel for Rickman’s general, who has experience with putting live at risk and understands the necessity of quick action. We feel for Mirren’s colonel, who has devoted years of her life to a mission to find a dangerous individual, and is now hamstrung. And we feel for Paul’s drone operator, bearing perhaps the most direct responsibility for pushing the button to deploy the deadly weapon.
It’s terrific ensemble work all around, highlighted by carefully juxtaposed close shots emphasizing the eyes, and the internal struggles, of each character involved. From our all-seeing perspective watching Eye in the Sky, the audience is given plenty of distinct perspectives to consider when making judgments on undertakings of this magnitude.
All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn't hurt. (Charles M. Schulz)
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