By Danny Peary
In Gavin Hood’s In the white-knuckle political thriller, Eye In The Sky, – directed by South African, Gavin Hood (Tsotsi, Rendition, Ender’s Game), and scripted by Guy Hibbert – Helen Mirren slips into military garb to play Colonel Katherine Powell, a UK-based commanding officer who wants to order a drone strike on a house in Nairobi, Kenya before the major terrorists who are inside depart. With time running out, her commanding officer, Lt. General Frank Benson (the late Alan Rickman in his last role), is elsewhere in a stuffy conference room trying to convince skeptical British diplomats of the legality of the strike.
When it is obvious that one of the terrorists is about to go into a highly populated area wearing a suicide vest, it looks like the missile strike will get clearance from British and Americans at the highest level. But when a little girl starts selling bread outside the house, Steve Watts (Aaron Paul), the drone pilot who sits in a bunker in Nevada, refuses to launch the missile until a new collateral damage assessment is done and there is less chance the girl will be harmed. When watching this exciting, provocative movie, you may find yourself rooting for something that you were against when you started watching. And afterward, you will be eager to engage in healthy debate about whether drone strikes are ever justified. This is the rare recent movie that encourages thinking, and director, Gavin Hood, speaks eloquently and at length about the moral dilemmas at the heart of Eye In The Sky.
“What Guy Hibbert and I wanted to do was present the most complex scenario in order to push it all the way up the kill chain,” the director says at the film’s New York press conference. “Maybe all drone strikes should still go up the chain of command. But they just wouldn’t have time. You can pause this film at any point and spin off into multiple discussions. I hope that this film is just a contribution to the discussions. We don’t profess to tell anyone what to think. Whether we should be there is a great question. To that point, the question that people ask me is, ‘What do you think of drones, and should we have drones or not?’ Well, let’s ask the question. The drone is a tactical weapon recently invented. At the time the long bow was invented, people objected to that too. ‘You’re shooting people from afar? How dare you, you coward!’ Every time a new weapon is invented, there is a policy discussion. We need that policy discussion. Should we be using drones over tribal Pakistan? Should we be intimidating a local population with surveillance 24/7 and with armed attacks happening every few weeks? Should it be okay that kids are afraid to go out and play if it’s a sunny day because drones can’t see you only on cloudy days? Should we be using a big strategy that turns that population against us? The drone is a tactical weapon. Should it be deployed in this way? Are we using it to better our overall objective of winning the hearts and minds of the population away from the streams of ideology? I hasten to say that not everyone in the military has one point of view. There are people in the military who absolutely agree with the suggestion made here that drones are being deployed in a bad way. But their argument is not about whether a drone is good or bad. It’s, ‘Are we deploying this new weapon in a way that moves us forward or backwards?’ And you have to assess that situation by the situation.”
And when it comes to the very personal and singular choices made by Aaron Paul’s drone pilot, Gavin Hood is equally thoughtful. “When Aaron’s character says, ‘I’m the pilot in command, responsible for releasing the weapon. I have the right to ask for the CD [assessment] to run again. I will not release my weapon until that happens.’ That is a line that they’re all trained to say. We didn’t make that up. He was trained to say that not because of his own conscience, but from a war crime point of view, to ensure that he’s following a legal order. He suspects that Helen Mirren’s character is bending the rules too much. He is not only allowed to, he is required to ask those questions, because he is the final person [to determine whether the drone is fired]. The trainer of drone pilots that I interviewed said to me, ‘It doesn’t matter if it’s the President on the line.’ That’s why the drone pilot is given that line to say [to his superiors]. So when Steve Watts says that [and questions Powell’s order], he’s actually doing the right thing. Now, do all drone pilots do the right thing? Or are most intimidated by someone as intimidating as the Colonel? I did speak to drone pilots who have taken that route. And also to F-16 pilots who have declined to drop their payload. I spoke to one who knew that his target in Iraq was not correct. When he visualised it, when he was flying over it, he realised that they got the coordinates wrong, so he pulled out. He told me, ‘I had a four-star General yelling at me, not very politely, ‘Drop your fucking load, Lieutenant!’ He said, ‘I just knew that it was wrong, and in that moment, I didn’t give a shit about whether I stayed in the Air Force or not.’ That doesn’t mean that all pilots would do that, but that’s what he did, and that’s where we got those kind of scenes. I asked, ‘So what happened?’ He said, ‘I landed my jet. They took my black box, and for two weeks I thought, ‘Jesus, am I going to get court-martialed or not?’ Then it just went away.’ Now the difficulty for a young Lieutenant in his position is if it is illegal, and he’s pushing back and pushing back, he could be court-martialed. Because if you follow an illegal order that’s a war crime…well, Nuremberg was about following orders that were war crimes. So these guys are in a really tight spot!”
Eye In The Sky is available now on Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital.
