Drone Strike Thriller ‘Eye In The Sky’ Is A New Kind Of War Movie For A New Kind Of War

The US made its first drone incursion into Afghanistan on September 7, 2000, a full year before the 9/11 attacks prompted former President George W Bush to declare the global War on Terror. Afghanistan has since become one of the most watched nations on Earth, and drone technology – which was initially conceived of for intelligence purposes – has evolved into more deadly machines.

One of the most controversial features of current US military policy, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles is shrouded in secrecy. However, in recent years, a number of films have sought to turn the tables, shedding light on the ramifications of drone warfare.

Just as the Vietnam War gave rise to a new kind of war movie in the 1970s, current US foreign policy appears to be lending itself to a specific treatment by cinema. Gone is the lone-wolf antihero of the Vietnam era, whose principle experience is one of alienation. Contemporary war films instead tend to emphasise the role of technology, intelligence gathering, and the depersonalised nature of modern warfare.

This trend is exemplified by recent release Eye in the Sky, which offers an account of a drone strike whose ethical implications are potentially so fraught that – by the time the British politicians in charge have done their best to abdicate responsibility – it is unclear who precisely has authorised the attack.

Eye in the Sky, which trades on similar themes to those explored in South African filmmaker Gavin Hood’s earlier Rendition, consciously positions itself as a provocation, encouraging its audience to consider an ethical dilemma that is uniquely contemporary and that – according at least to the logic expounded by the film – is almost impossible to resolve.

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Rise Of The Drone Movie

Intelligence and counter-intelligence are hardly new concepts, either in war or in the cinema. Recent period pieces such as last year’s Bridge of Spies or the television series The Americans demonstrate the extent to which surveillance technology is a long-term staple of the espionage thriller.

However, gone are the days of the Cold War. Eye in the Sky is one of a number of contemporary films that employ drones in an effort to describe a radically altered geopolitical reality – one that doesn’t overly concern itself with national borders.

And as surveillance technology has evolved, it has assumed a new range of capabilities, the ramifications of which, such films suggest, we are perhaps as yet unable to fully comprehend.

“You’ve just gotta continue compartmentalising”, a superior advises drone pilot Thomas Egan in 2014’s Good Kill. But this presents a challenge to the family man, as his targets increasingly come to resemble the wife and kids to whom he must go home at the end of each shift.

Egan is desperate to return to active duty. Daily life with his family only compounds his sense of the brutality of his work, and the nature of his assignment, in turn, makes any kind of normal family life impossible.

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A Numbers Game

Eye in the Sky moves beyond the individual pilot to examine the full chain of command that’s involved in authorising a drone attack. There’s a ludicrous quality to the apparatus that the film describes; at one point, the UK Foreign Secretary is interrupted while experiencing a bout of food poisoning in Singapore, and the buck is passed as far as the US Vice President, who takes the call during a publicised game of table tennis in Beijing.

The urgency stems from a vital new piece of intelligence, which suggests that a Nigerian terror group based in Kenya is planning an imminent suicide bomb attack. Following the discovery, the British military officers charged with capturing a UK citizen and high-ranking member of the group push to transition from a capture to a kill mission.

Eye in the Sky engages multiple perspectives in examining the factors that play into a drone strike, with the film’s focus shifting between the cogs in the machine: the US pilots charged with the thankless job of pushing the button; the Somali CIA operatives whose work on the ground places them at real risk; the senior bureaucrats responsible for making the call, who struggle to reconcile a range of political and ethical considerations; the politicians themselves, happy to maintain blissful ignorance; the military officers whose vested interests lie in executing the strike; and the Nigerian refugees, conscious of a vague threat, but unaware of the imminent danger from above.

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Means And Ends

The complex global network that Eye in the Sky describes, which is a common feature of the contemporary war film, suggests a model of engagement that is conducted less along national lines than by ideological and religious groups, big business and government agencies.

In a pivotal scene in Kathryn Bigalow’s 2012 film Zero Dark Thirty, which depicts the effort to locate and capture Osama bin Laden, several CIA agents watch news footage of President Obama declaring his opposition to torture. The public stance is in direct opposition to the strategies that the team has been employing in an effort at extracting information from various terror suspects being held captive in Pakistan.

In Zero Dark Thirty, as in Rendition, torture functions much like Eye in the Sky’s drone strike to pose the question: How far is too far? At what point do the ends no longer justify the means?

For Eye in the Sky’s bureaucrat decision makers, the answer arrived at is 45 percent. A young girl has set up a stall selling bread in the immediate vicinity of the target, and should the likelihood of her sustaining a fatal injury exceed 45 percent, the operation’s off.

The film’s audience might arrive at a different conclusion. But a shared characteristic of films such as Eye in the Sky, Good Kill, Zero Dark Thirty and Paul Greengrass’ wartime thriller about falsified intelligence in the lead-up to the Iraq War, Green Zone, is the device of presenting action in the form of surveillance footage or imagery captured from drones.

Such a choice is not merely stylistic – in aligning the audience’s perspective with that of the war machine, the films imply that ignorance does not necessarily free a society from complicity in the military actions taken in its name.

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Alice is a freelance writer based in Sydney. She writes on cinema from her blog american night.