In pondering why Gavin Hood’s drone-strike thriller Eye In The Sky failed to involve me very deeply, I keep coming back to other movies like it. These are the films in which soldiers, spies and politicians stand around in different locations worrying about moral issues as the clock ticks down to zero-hour and the political complications and unspeakable dilemmas become ever more excruciating: Sydney Lumet’s Fail-Safe, and various wishy-washy DLC-liberal movies by Rod Lurie, Andrew Niccol and George Clooney/Grant Heslov. My conclusion is that, like many of them, it allows the Big Issue to become the main character, and neglects to allow the drama to unfold among the characters.
In Eye In The Sky, people in different locations – military bases in England and Nevada, the British Cabinet Office in London, Singapore (where the UK foreign secretary is visiting), Beijing (ditto the US secretary of state) – talk to one another over satellite links as a drone hovers over the anticipated meeting, in a poverty-stricken, militant-controlled exurb of Nairobi, between five most-wanted al-Shabaab terrorists, two of them British nationals.
In charge of the mission is Colonel Powell (Helen Mirren, her fabulousness undimmed by drab camouflage costuming), who is on the line to triggerman-drone pilot Aaron Paul, based outside Las Vegas (presumably the same installation Ethan Hawke operates from in his rather more absorbing, character-based drone thriller Good Kill), and to the British attorney general (Richard McCabe) and her boss Lt General Benson (Alan Rickman in a posthumous last hurrah).
The latter pair endlessly debate the legal, and occasionally the moral, implications of drone strikes, while the British defence secretary (Jeremy Northam) keeps buck-passing all the big decisions up to the foreign secretary (Iain Glen), and even to the Americans. There is a lot of talk. And then more talk.
With all these people sitting in chairs (the four main actors never even met each other on set), it’s a relief to have Jama Farah, a Kenyan operative, on the ground in Nairobi being actually heroic, sending insect-sized mini-drones into the terrorists’ building and trying to prevent a young girl outside the compound from being killed. Better yet, he’s played by the excellent Barkhad Abdi, chief hijacker from the Tom Hanks vehicle Captain Phillips.
Abdi’s scenes are consistently riveting, and it’s always a disappointment to return to the yakking politicos and soldiers. That little girl injects a layer of sentimentality that cheapens the film somewhat, reducing it to a civics lesson instead of a drama with depth and soul (like the Channel 4 series Omagh, for instance). There’s plenty of tension here, expertly escalated, but an hour afterwards it had vanished from my mind altogether.
