Eye in the Sky (2015)
Directed by Gavin Hood
A UK-based military officer in command of a top secret drone operation to capture terrorists in Kenya discovers the targets are planning a suicide bombing and the mission escalates from “capture” to “kill.” As American pilot Steve Watts is about to engage, a nine-year old girl enters the kill zone, triggering an international dispute reaching the highest levels of US and British government over the moral, political, and personal implications of modern warfare.
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What critics compared Eye in the Sky to
“Eye in the Sky” is a nifty British procedural in the tick-tock “Homeland” vein — you know, “10:20 AM, Jomo Kenyatta Airport, Nairobi, Kenya,” followed by “4:22 AM, Surrey, England” — that aspires to be the “Zero Dark Thirty” of the drone war.
Appropriately for a post- Zero Dark Thirty mediation on the War On Terror, Helen Mirren is in full “I’m the motherfucker” mode as long-serving U.K. Colonel Katherine Powell, whose ongoing pursuit of a radicalized British citizen has led her—and the drone-mounted American missile array she commands—to a hideout in Nairobi.
Directed by Gavin Hood (Ender’s Game, Tsotsi), Eye in the Sky is a cerebral film in the vein of Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe, examining the disconnect between ethics and bureaucracy behind modern warfare’s new rules of engagement—managing to keep the suspense and drama at heightened levels as people, in essence, debate via telephone and computers on whether or not to push a button.
The screenwriter Guy Hibbert (who wrote the television movie, Who Gets the Dog?, 2007) and director Gavin Hood (Ender's Game, 2013) juggle the themes of avoiding accountability, collateral damage, politics, and propaganda.
Adding the presence of a pair of would-be suicide bombers inside the house and a cute little girl selling bread outside, Eye in the Spy stacks the deck in its moral debate; the interest is in seeing how screenwriter Guy Hibbert and director Gavin Hood ( Tsotsi , X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Ender’s Game ) skilfully shuffle and play their cards.
The actor-writer-director Gavin Hood follows up the mostly computer-generated Ender’s Game—about a boy training to fight intergalactic war through a simulator that turned out to be real—with a similar but much more realistic battle pitched across nations in Eye in the Sky.
Directed by Gavin Hood (“Ender’s Game”) from a script by BAFTA-winning writer Guy Hibbert, “Eye in the Sky” has the feel of one of those dinner table debates from CBS’ “Blue Bloods” writ large.
This latest effort, Eye in the Sky , helmed by South African Gavin Hood ( Tsotsi , Ender’s Game ) and penned by Brit Guy Hibbert, is considerably more compelling.