Eye In The Sky
Director: Gavin Hood
Stars: Helen Mirren, Aaron Paul, Alan Rickman
Duration: 102 mins
Class: 15
KRS Releasing Ltd

“In war, truth is the first casualty,” is the maxim with which Eye in the Sky opens. Whether that is indeed so, or whether innocence can claim to be the first casualty is moot, given both truth and innocence are given short shrift as the tension-filled story told in Eye in the Sky unfolds.

Helen Mirren is Colonel Katherine Powell, a military intelligence officer hunkered down in a London bunker overseeing a top secret operation to arrest Susan Danford (Lex King), a British citizen radicalised into the al-Shabab terror network. Danford is hiding out with a group of terrorists in a safe house in Nairobi, Kenya.

Spying on them via high-tech drone technology, the mission parameters change when Powell realises the group intends to embark on a suicide mission. Ordering American drone pilot Steve Watts (Aaron Paul) to destroy the safe-house, the operation is jeopardised when a little girl is seen selling bread just outside the house’s walls, prompting Powell, her superior Lieutenant General Frank Benson (Alan Rickman) and those in the higher echelons of government to face an impossible decision.

Last year’s superb thriller Good Kill, starring Ethan Hawke, was one of the first films to feature drone warfare, examining on the toll taken on Hawke’s drone pilot as he carries out his duties attacking terrorists in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Eye in the Sky focuses on the one mission; a mission that is starkly simple at the outset, but gets more complicated when this nine-year-old Alia (Aisha Takow) comes into the frame, literally and figuratively.

We are introduced to Alia from the outset – she is a feisty, keen-eyed, intelligent girl who takes lessons from her father, who hides the schoolbooks in order not to be found out. That we get to know Alia much better than the power players deciding her fate should make the issue more unambiguous for the viewer… Or does it?

The cast is uniformly superb

Director Gavin Hood and screenwriter Guy Hibbert appreciate the intelligence of their audience, an audience that is tragically privy to the destruction suicide bombers can wreak, thanks to the incessant news coverage of these incidents which occur on a depressingly frequent scale.

And so, the film throws down the gauntlet, raising painfully difficult moral and ethical questions and never answering them satisfactorily. Because, really, there are no satisfactory answers. It offers clear, concise justification for both sides of the capture versus kill argument.

After much vacillation, however, as the question is bumped further up the military, political and legal ladders as minor civil servants track down their superiors to get the go-ahead they need.

For it is never as simple as good versus evil, and it’s not about cynicism versus pragmatism or the rights of the individual versus the rights of the many. It is about the ability and necessity of seeing the bigger picture and some people in this scenario have to. Whether you agree with their decisions or not, you do thank heavens that it is people vastly more qualified than yourself who have to make these momentous decisions.

Hood keeps the anxiety levels high throughout for both his protagonists and his audience, adding some minor, much-needed, slightly comic relief as the British Foreign Secretary deals with the crisis while fighting off a bout of stomach flu.

He is aided by editor Megan Gill who effortlessly cuts between the action which takes us from London where Powell sits in her dark bunker, to the safe house and its environs in Nairobi, to the desert air base in Nevada, where Watts awaits instructions, to a base in Hawaii where another officer is charged with identifying the suspects and back to Whitehall in London, protagonist in this theatre of war where everyone operates from within the safety of their respective stations. Except for one person, that is, with Captain Phillips Barkhad Abdi as the only operative staking out the safe house on the ground.

The cast is uniformly superb. Mirren is utterly cool, calm, compelling and convincing the tough-talking, no-nonsense Powell who never takes her eyes off the prize. If, at times, she appears heartless at others ethically murky, this is merely a reflection of the morally grey area of drone warfare.

Paul impresses as the pilot tasked with pulling the trigger, while Alan Rickman’s Lt. Gen Benson, is the voice of calm and reason, standing between Powell’s willingness to launch an immediate attack and the bureaucrats’ dilly-dallying.

Rickman’s final words, where he eloquently and succinctly describes the role of a soldier in today’s complicated world, will move you. That it is his final performance adds tremendous emotional weight knowing we shall never see this versatile and charismatic actor again, an actor whose silky, mellifluous voice and total commitment to his craft graced so many diverse characters in a vast repertoire over the years. He will be sorely missed.