Movie Review: Eye in the Sky
Image source: The Telegraph
Kenya: in the wake of a devastating terrorist attack on a Nairobi shopping mall, a group of al-Shabaab militants meet in a safehouse, arming up for further attacks. Blocks away, a Kenyan intelligence officer (Barkhad Abdi) risks his life to keep camera eyes on the militants. Northwood, Sussex: hard-edged Colonel Katherine Powell (Helen Mirren) pushes for a drone strike that will eliminate four high-value terrorists and save countless lives. London: Lt. General Frank Benson (Alan Rickman) sits mired among warring politicians, all unwilling to take responsibility for authorizing a kill. Nevada: young American Air Force pilot Steve Watts (Aaron Paul) pilots the Hellfire drone, but hesitates with his finger on the trigger.
Feet from the terrorists’ hideout, a young girl sells bread at the edge of blast range.
This is the premise of Eye in the Sky, a tautly suspenseful and brutally insightful thriller about ethics, responsibility, and collateral damage in an age of drone strikes and remote surveillance. Eye in the Sky follows a team of American, British, and Kenyan army officers, intelligence agents, and politicians scattered across the globe as they track a group of extremists they’ve been ordered to capture, and clash over questions of morality, authority, and public image. Although the premise offers the opportunity for a more typical action-flick, Eye in the Sky relies almost entirely on dialogue, (The Guardian describes it as a “talky thriller”) and unfolds nearly in real time. Despite a dearth of car chases, explosions, and hand-to-hand combat, the film is riveting, the breathless suspense focused entirely on the “agonizingly protracted” decision-making process. As the clock ticks, the militants prepare to depart, suicide vests at the ready. Meanwhile, politicians desperate to absolve themselves of blame endlessly “refer up” to higher and higher authorities– the British Foreign Secretary, then the US Secretary of State– while military officials furiously recalculate collateral damage estimates. Eye in the Sky is intensely focused, as well: there are no love interests, no backstories, subplots, or comedic bursts. The central drama is all-consuming, and seemingly divorced from the everyday lives of the participants.
Despite the high ethical stakes of the film, the tone of Eye in the Sky never becomes preachy or descends into moralizing, but presents the painful (and often painfully slow) operations at work behind a contentious and timely issue. The acting is unanimously superb, and the cinematography shifts constantly and effortlessly across the globe without the slightest break in tension.
Most readers have probably encountered the “trolley problem”, a classic thought experiment in moral psychology. It goes something like this: there’s a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, there are ten people stuck on the tracks, unable to get out of the way of the deadly vehicle. If you, an observer, pull a lever, you could divert the trolley into a different track, where a single person stands, unawares. Do you sacrifice one person to save ten lives, or let events unfold without your interference?
Eye in the Sky is, in essence, a fleshed-out, modern take on the trolley problem. But what happens when the trolley-victims are so far down the tracks that you can’t see them? What happens when the single victim is an innocent child? What happens when you can pull the lever half a world away? Which is more valuable, a little girl in the path of shrapnel, or 80 future deaths? If you’re a politician, the answer seems to be: you make a phone call. And all the while, the trolley speeds on.
Eye in the Sky is out April 1, 2016 in the United States.