Review: "Eye in the Sky"

In Director Gavin Hood's excellent thriller, Eye in the Sky, an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) flies over Kenya, where a secret meeting is taking place between members of al-Shabaab. The drone pilot (Aaron Paul) sits comfortably at a computer terminal, monitoring their actions from thousands of miles away at a Nevada air base. On the ground in Nairobi, a resourceful agent (Barkhad Abdi from Captain Phillips) uses smaller devices --disguised as birds or insects-- to obtain better camera angles. The footage travels around the world to a U.S. base in Hawaii, where a facial recognition expert confirms the identities of the meeting participants, and to England, where a British colonel (Helen Mirren) orders Kenyan forces to move in and capture the targets.

Not unexpectedly, complications arise that raise the threat level enough for the colonel to upgrade Operation Egret from a capture mission to a kill order. This requires approval from her commanding officer (Alan Rickman, in his final on-screen role) and various political and legal advisors, all observing from a conference room in London. Collateral damage is minimized by the accuracy of the drone's Hellfire missile, but a young girl selling bread on the street is within the blast radius. If they greenlight the strike, she will most likely be killed, an acceptable loss in the mind of the colonel. If the request is refused or delayed, they risk losing a high-value target, one that has evaded capture for six long years and is responsible for the loss of many lives.

You may find Eye in the Sky to have more in common with the straightforward suspense of Fail Safe than the farce of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, but Hood and Screenwriter Guy Hibbert use humor to their full advantage in the scenes that follow this new wrinkle. Seeing government officials debate, pass the buck, and hide behind as much red tape as possible to avoid the responsibility of approving the drone strike had me laughing out loud on several occasions. Thanks to the work of Megan Gill, who edited the picture, it's not a jarring tonal shift; the film miraculously maintains a level of intensity even while veering into absurdity for a spell. Playing everything as straight as possible, of course, this is also the section of the film where the work of Mirren, Paul, and Rickman really makes a difference. Regardless of whether the drone is ordered to engage, the difficult and frustrating decision-making process may, in fact, be the film's best argument against the notion that drone warfare is detached from human emotions.

Many directors might have aimed for a grittier style, but there is a precision to the work being done by Hood and Cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos that mirrors the high-tech spycraft on display. Johnny Breedt's production design also adds a sense of visual irony by keeping the good guys in closed, dark rooms while the bad guys operate in broad daylight. It's an interesting choice that, alongside certain arguments made by characters in the film, raises the question of just who the government is most afraid of. The enemy? Or, the public?