The use of military drones is
paradoxical, to be sure. It’s made warfare simpler and more impersonal (or so you think; Eye in the Sky isn’t so sure about that). And yet, the
morality and human cost of such operations, in the micro and the macro sense, are so tangled and complicated that it’s hard to comprehend how any person can
make such a decision.
Gavin Hood’s film shows us how the
process isn’t so easy. Its narrative is enclosed within a single mission, a terrorist
surveillance operation in Kenya that turns into a potential threat. The
audience witnesses the mission from every angle, from the agent staking things
out on the ground (Barkhad Abdi), to the British colonel running the mission (Helen
Mirren) and American drone pilots (Aaron Paul and Phoebe Fox) who are all thousands of
miles away from the action (and each other), to the general (Alan Rickman) and
pols in London and elsewhere squabbling over the legality and optics of it all.
Also, the Kenyan civilians in the vicinity who don’t suspect a thing.
The movie’s not tense like a
thriller might be, but agonizing. None of the major players are callous or
bloodthirsty types so easy to condemn. The military officers and agents writhe
over their actions and decisions right with the audience. The politicians, on
the contrary, keep passing the buck further and further up the chain of
command, and sometimes down it, to a degree that would be almost comical if the
film weren’t so sober and dead serious. But this never comes off as political
cowardice or incompetent decision-making; it’s out of a true reluctance to take
innocent life with which one can strongly empathize. At some point, though,
someone has to make a terrible decision no one feels good about. And yet, for
all the time the viewer hopes for an unlikely happy ending, there are undeniably
moments where they want the strike to be made. Literally from scene-to-scene,
their opinion can change.
The debate presented on the issue
consists mostly of the simple points you’ve probably heard in media soundbites.
But while simplicity could have faulted a more ponderous and polemical
production, here it serves the picture well in two ways. One is because the
mission storyline has an immediacy that doesn’t allow for the long and hard
debate that such an issue requires. Which could implicitly suggest that drone warfare
is justified, or that it’s part of a repeating cycle in the War on Terror with
an inertia too great to stop. Indeed, while the majority of the film focuses on
the in-the-moment morality of drones, the conclusion says tiny but telling things
about the larger picture.
The second way is that it leaves the
viewer thinking about the issue, instead of wrapping things in a neat package
that tells them how to think. And as a well-shot, well-acted, smart, and
empathetic work, it’ll stick with them long enough that they will think about. That’s
probably the highest praise you can give to an issue movie.
