Eye In The Sky

Synopsis:  A British colonel, Katherine Powell (Helen Mirren) is working with American drone pilot Steve Watts (Aaron Paul) and on-the-ground African operative Jama Farah (Barkhad Abdi) in an international operation to capture terrorists in Kenya. When they discover that the terrorists’ meeting is actually a preparation for a suicide bombing, she must seek permission from her superior officer, General Frank Benson (Alan Rickman) in order to escalate her mission from capture to kill. He, in turn, must seek permission from the Minister for Defence (Jeremy Northam) who wants to confer with the Minister for Foreign Affairs (Iain Glen) before signing off. But when a local girl (Faisa Hassan) enters the kill zone to sell her mother’s bread, the moral implications of the mission become more and more complex.

The brave new world of military action conducted through the auspices of unmanned drones may have changed the face of aerial warfare forever but it hasn’t changed the moral dilemmas associated with the inevitability of collateral civilian casualties as a result of bombing raids. If anything, it’s heightened them. At least that’s the case with the situation at the heart of Eye In The Sky. Best known for his Oscar winning film Tsotsi (2005) and his political kidnap thriller, Rendition (2007), Gavin Hood’s new film delves into the murky waters of military interests versus some serious political face-saving and arse-covering as both hierarchies bump heads with themselves and with each other in order to make sure that if the mission goes pear-shaped, the blame will land with someone else.

This fascinating insight into the complex protocols that must be adhered to before permission for the trigger to be pulled can be passed down the line to the pilot is just one of the dilemmas that Guy Hibbert’s screenplay explores. It also tackles the issue of the desensitizing effect of remote warfare on those who sit before a screen with joystick in hand and fly their mission in some foreign country without leaving their own, and then clock off and go home for a good night’s sleep. It’s well tackled in its opening scenes – Mirren’s character is woken by her snoring husband, Rickman’s character stops on the way to the war to buy a doll for his grand-daughter’s birthday and Paul’s character has the luxury of hitting the snooze button instead of responding to reveille – all very normal, all very mundane and all this before a hard day at the office fighting the war on terror. It’s subject matter that’s been tackled recently by Andrew Niccol’s 2014 film, Good Kill. That film (even though it was set in the same Las Vegas base as this one) is more concerned with the psychological impact on the remote pilots while Eye In The Sky is more about moral responsibility – is the life of one little girl selling bread on the street an acceptable price to pay to prevent a terrorist attack that might cost eighty lives?

Filmically, though, both films suffer from the very thing they’re about; the remoteness of the player from the action with the key characters only able to interact through screens. The deadening effect of this has much to say about the subject matter but little to offer in terms of dynamic story-telling. When we’re suddenly offered an unexpected moment of action as Farah runs for his life from armed locals, it’s like a slap in the face (in a good way) that snaps us out of our dulled senses from too much watching characters on screen watching other screens. It reminded me that for much of the rest of the film I’d been appreciating the tension of the situation more than experiencing it. The fine cast do their best to overcome this and are often successful, helped out by excellent supporting actors in their respective locations, but it’s hard not to want to see the leads, especially Mirren and Rickman (it’s his last on-screen role, after all) get up-close-and-personal with each other, face to face.

Still, Eye in the Sky left me with plenty to think about and I’d probably rather have a cinematically-constrained film with a compelling and provocative story than the other way around.  Towards the end, in defence of his position, General Benson tells the Prime Minister’s advisor that she should “Never tell a soldier that he does not know the cost of war.” And fair enough: he’s been a boots-on-the-ground soldier in his day. They all have. And they each bring that knowledge and experience to this new, technological, virtual theatre of war. But what of the next generation, the video-game generation who only experience the cost of warfare through their high-definition screens? It’s one of the many questions that linger after the closing credits.

 

 

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