Posted: Sep 08, 2021 5:03 pm
Eye in the Sky (2015)Good performances, especially Mirren & Rickman as the British brass trying (for 90 minutes) to get authorization for a drone Hellfire strike on a house in a Somali enclave of Kenya. The scenario is ridiculous, of course, because it shows every one of the decision makers anguishing over the decision - from the PM's cabinet secretaries to the high school recruit in a Las Vegas bunker tasked with pulling the trigger on his video game joystick that will launch the missile. The movie is about how much these people "feel" toward the victims of their bombings, how much they value brown lives in a dirty corner of the empire, and how a 90% collateral death toll is justified because the decision-making is "difficult". ("Drone Papers" began publication the same year this movie was released - 2015.) You wouldn't know this aspect of the lie by watching Eye in the Sky, because here there's only one potential collateral victim, and several legitimate targets in the act, whose identities are confirmed with the utmost care & insistence, using near-unassailable intel methods.
Total fiction. Still worth a watch because... good acting, good direction, great pacing. Also, when consulted, Americans in the civilian hierarchy are appropriately reptilian & domineering, the Brits quivering and indecisive - but that's a trick of contrasts (if also the only realistic politics in the movie). Rickman is set up to being the only member on the British side who isn't anguishing over the decision - but wait, no, it turns out he's just stoic. The movie opens and closes with him struggling with another decision: buying the right doll for his daughter. He has to get it right, you see, because he's human. He has feelings.