Cast: Helen Mirren, Alan Rickman, Aaron Paul, Barkhad Abdi, Iain Glen, Phoebe Fox, Monica Dolan, Meganne Young
Director: Gavin Hood
The modern warfare is extreme, cruel and clean. Its barbaric, sometimes even more than the old barbarians, but the killer does not get the blood on his hands. The whole idea behind invention of gunpowder and bullets was to be able to kill someone without getting oneself dirty in the process. Gavin Hood’s Eye in The Sky is a good film, when it comes to form or structure, but it is a very scary and dreadful film when we understand the context and the gravity of the images. Eye In The Sky is a movie about a drone mission aimed at capturing terrorists.
The drone visuals reveal the suspects entering in a house, further a ground agent uses an electronic beetle to get visuals from inside the house. Inside the house the terrorists are preparing for a suicide-bombing mission, and strapping themselves with explosives in their vests. These visuals immediately transform the capture mission into a kill mission. The pilots get instructions to drop the hellfire missile.
Before pressing the trigger, the pilots look at the ground and see a young girl in the kill zone, taking a moment and asking for a revaluation on the impact. There are four locations in the movie, the tactical control room headed by the Colonel Katherine Powell (Helen Mirren), the command control room, where Lieutenant General Frank Benson (Alan Rickman) is with the minister and his advisers to take the commands. The drone cockpit, manned by pilots, which is somewhere in a desert, and the kill zone which is a target somewhere in Africa. The film is mostly about the decision to strike or not, since the target is far removed and there might be civilian casualties.
The X-Men Wolverines’ director has played efficiently with the subject. He retains the intensity and keeps you on your toes; does not wait for you to settle and immediately takes you in the war room. While modern war rooms are separated by hundreds of miles from each other and thousands of miles from the target, everything happens right in the moment.
Warfronts are now simple screens with visuals of the targets. An armed drone hovering several thousand meters above the target is providing the real-time feed. There is no recoil after pulling the trigger, no deafening noise, just a flickering dot or cross hair that seems to blow up on its own.
While the technology and systems look very good, the men look just average. Gone are the days when you needed muscle power, Eye In The Sky does not show a single character with muscular features, this itself indicates the shift in how wars are being fought and the warfront being reduced to a screen. The cast tries very hard to show how difficult a decision it is, but somehow the movie reeks of the imminent attack, and that everyone is pushing gradually towards that decision.
Alan Rickman as Gen. Benson is effective. He seems to maintain the grip on his character much better than the others. When the mission is over, he steps out from the war room where a sergeant hands him a doll — which Rickman had ordered to give to his own daughter. In a crafty performance, Rickman is able to deliver a ruthless military chief who executes and also a father who loves his daughter.
Eye in The Sky is well crafted and is in line with those films that make the rest of the world think that the US is very careful about their drone programme. It is a more stylised version of Why We Fight, justifying the American involvement in the wars.
So, in effect, the movie could have just been one of the several drone strike videos on YouTube. But credit should be given to the near perfect visuals, the accuracy in representing the drone field views.
The writer is founder, Lightcube Film Society
