Eye in the Sky

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.