Film Review: Eye in the Sky
Of-the-moment thriller mixes action, satire and melodrama to debate the ethics of drone warfare.
By Rex Roberts Mar 8, 2016
It starts as just another day at the office, although this office comprises an international military force dedicated to intelligence gathering and antiterrorism operations. In London, Lt. Gen. Frank Benson (Alan Rickman) stops to buy a doll for his child before heading to a meeting with cabinet officers to witness, via drone surveillance, the capture of a “high-value” Islamic militant. In Las Vegas, a green Air Force cadet (Phoebe Fox) begins her first day on the job at the ground-control station where she will help pilot the drone. And in a secure bunker somewhere in Britain, Col. Katherine Powell (Helen Mirren) is waiting to give the command for Kenyan troops to raid the house hiding the militant.
Then things get interesting. The terrorist, a radicalized British citizen, suddenly leaves the house under surveillance for another in a poverty-stricken district controlled by Islamists, one off-limits to Kenyan forces because it’s also a residential neighborhood. With help from an enterprising undercover operative (Barkhad Abdi), Powell determines that the terrorist has rendezvoused with another radicalized foreigner, this one an American, and they are in the process of prepping two suicide bombers. The mission to capture turns into a mission to kill—the drone is equipped with Hellfire missiles—but the proximity of the targeted house to family residences assures collateral damage, that well-known euphemism for the death of innocent people.
Taut, provocative and timely, Eye in the Sky has the all the right elements: inspired casting headlined by Mirren, Abdi (the Somali pirate in Captain Phillips) and Rickman (in what turned out to be one of his last roles); an intelligent and expertly constructed script that mixes action, suspense, satire, melodrama and dialectics; efficient production design that convincingly evokes Homeland offices in Whitehall, slums in Nairobi, and a military base in the Nevada desert (all recreated in Cape Town, South Africa); and an amusing conflation of Bond gadgetry and actual drone technology. The music, camerawork and judiciously used special effects all contribute to director Gavin Hood’s engaging cinematic chimera, a movie that can be compared to In the Loop or Dr. Strangelove as easily as, say, 13 Hours or American Sniper.
On one hand, the driving dilemma of Eye in the Sky, whether targeted assassination is an ethical option in war or otherwise, is no longer hotly debated, at least in the United States, the argument in its favor tipped by a president whose credentials include a Nobel Peace Prize. On the other, the filmmakers put their thumb on the scales by having a young girl (Aisha Takow) set up shop to sell her mother’s bread next to the Islamists’ safe house: She is in the kill zone. Hood (Tsotsi, Ender’s Game) and screenwriter Guy Hibbert up the ante at least five times over the course of the film, and do so with clever plot twists. They also manipulate the audience in less subtle ways, allowing us telling glimpses of the home life of the girl and her family—they are good Muslims doing their best to cope with the moralizing, misogynous fanatics all around them—just as they have Benson fuss about buying the right doll: The irony is achingly obvious.
Hood and Hibbert, however, share a wry sense of humor and an appreciation for the absurd. The British politicians and lawyers, literally caught with their pants down, comically dodge responsibility throughout the movie, while their American counterparts have no patience for passing the ball, parodied in a short but surreal set-piece depicting the U.S. secretary of state playing ping pong in China. Much of the debate about whether to proceed with the mission hinges less on the potential for loss of life than on the possibility of bad press or, worse, errant video popping up on Wikileaks. “If they kill 80 people, we win the propaganda war,” says the British attorney general (Richard McCabe). “If we kill one child, they do.”
Cherubic drone pilot Steve Watts (Aaron Paul), the lowest link on the “kill chain,” turns out to have the greatest qualms about pulling the trigger, along with his inexperienced co-pilot who, incongruously, has been assigned to a duty so sensitive it requires input from the White House—another of Hood and Hibbert’s contrivances. By contrast, Jeremy Northam and Iain Glen (and to a certain extent, Rickman) bring their best deadpan deliveries to their roles as British ministers. The one thankless part in the film falls to Monica Dolan, who as an under-secretary for Africa sits in on the Whitehall meeting, where she drones on so sourly even ardent pacifists will want to put a sock in it.
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