Eye in the sky
Emotive yet highly effective, drone drama Eye In The Sky ratchets up the tension and devastation around the nasty business of hi-tech modern warfare. I’d love to say it drones on, but Gavin Hood’s film is actually pretty nifty, drawing its characters and making its points with swift economy, even when it’s dealing in vague clichés. Helen Mirren plays British Colonel Katherine Powell, who conducts the mission from the HQ bunker in London. If this film is to be believed – and it does a fair job of convincing you it should be – modern war is like a conference call, with various parties joining in and watching on laptops around the world. Col Powell is orchestrating the capture of a white British Muslim woman-turnedinternational- terrorist, now holed up in a house in a Nairobi suburb. Meanwhile Lieutenant-General Frank Benson (played with typically clipped efficiency by Alan Rickman, in what was sadly his final film role) arrives in Whitehall to talk government ministers through what they’re watching on screen, like some kind of deadly, dry football commentator.
There’s a Kenyan commander patched in on the call, his ground troops ready to swoop, and we’ve also got the US army operatives piloting the drone from a base in Nevada; Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul takes the controls of the drone, with its powerful surveillance camera and far more destructive Hellfire missile. Most importantly, there’s a man on the ground, played by Barkhad Abdi, the Somali actor who took over the ship from Tom Hanks in Captain Phillips. Now he’s a double agent spy sort of chap, operating tiny local drones in the shape of a humming bird and a flying beetle, which peek into enemy houses and show what’s going on. Which is (of course!) dastardly Islamists gearing up for a suicide-bombing raid.
OK, says Col Powell, this alters the mission from a ‘capture’ to a ‘kill’. She wants to bomb the lot of them. But they can’t send in the drone missile because now there’s a little girl from next door selling bread just outside the terrorists’ compound.
Despite this overly cute plot device, the film flits about very credibly in what feels like real time, to show the tortuous political and moral hoops being jumped through and the bucks being passed. We get to grips with military vernacular: ‘ROEs’ (that’s rules of engagement, to you); ‘CDE’ – come on, it’s easy: collateral damage estimate.
The evasive politicians (Jeremy Northam, in his second cameo of recent weeks) contrast with the practicalities of attorneys and the tough pragmatism of the military. Col Powell wants her woman badly: she’s been tracking her for six years. The Brits prevaricate and debate; the White House would blow everything to smithereens. We even ‘refer up’ to the Foreign Secretary (Iain Glenn) who’s at a trade conference in China, but who’s got a touch of Beijing belly and has to be interrupted on the loo.
Even within this schematic set-up and some crude characterisation (although Mirren and Rickman give a character depth with just a couple of precision-aimed glances), director Hood makes it work, ticking over nervously as the clock runs down and taking us through the agonies of moral decisions – modern warfare looks grubby, cowardly, expedient, ruthless, remarkable, vicious, ridiculous, technologically amazing and horrifically lethal. Plenty to ponder, then.
It’s the first war movie I can recall to feel quite so accurate about the way things are done these days, and I’m not sure we’ve ever been quite so in on the machinations, the chain of command and the video game spectacle. As such it’s definitely a film to home in on: Eye In The Sky is quite the eye-opener.