Coastal View News
Sometimes a movie’s story does all the work. “Zero Dark
Thirty” is an example: The story of how Bin Laden got taken down, by itself, is
enough to draw us in. Or even “The Big Short”—I’m pretty sure it could have
been played by sock puppets and I still would have been interested (and pissed
off!).
“Eye in the Sky” feels like one of these movies. It is not
based on a true story (though stuff like this surely happens), but it only has
like four sets and it is focused on a single incident. So it is the story, plus
whatever tangled up complications it engenders, that is center stage.
That story is about a British-led (U.S. assisted) drone
operation in East Africa. A couple of biggish terrorists (though not Bin Laden
big) are meeting, and the British military is hoping to capture them. But
things do not go quite as planned, and so the capture mission soon becomes a
bomb-them-into-oblivion mission.
The problem is, right before drone pilot Steve Watts (Aaron
Paul) drops the bomb, a cute little girl who did nothing to nobody, and for
cuteness’ sakes was just playing with a hula-hoop, walks into the danger zone.
Colonel Katherine Powell (Helen Mirren), who is in charge of the mission, and
her superior, Lt. General Frank Benson (Alan Rickman), still say go for it. But
Watts holds up a sec. Everyone hopes the girl will just go back home. But in
the meantime every single person in the British government, it seems, waffles
back and forth, calls his or her superior, and argues about whether or not they
should do it anyway.
On the one hand, a terrorist attack is imminent—dozens of
innocent lives are at stake. On the other hand, there’s the girl, and she is so
damn cute.
All this hand wringing over what to do feels a little odd.
Don’t I hear about civilian casualties from these drone strikes like every
other day? Isn’t it: “12 civilians die in strike in Yemen that kills 2
terrorists”; “7 children die in Libya”; “Scores of civilians die in bombed
hospital where there were no terrorists at all and they just went for it anyway”?
It’s kind of hard for me to believe that the military higher ups really are
stressing that much over an innocent life here or there.
But who knows, maybe I am wrong. Maybe each hula-hooper gets
her own mini day in court before the Hellfire missile comes raining down. (Then
I kind of want to know why so many civilians are dying!)
At any rate, “Eye in the Sky” is nothing if not tense. But unfortunately
a lot of that tension comes from the excruciating indecisiveness of its
characters. That’s not exactly fun to watch. When I witness two friends bicker
for half an hour over where we should eat dinner, it’s tense all right, but
it’s not exactly edge-of-my-seat, pins and needles material. Half of “Eye in
the Sky” is various British higher ups saying, “Yes, we should do it. O.K.
let’s do it,” then, “No, wait, we have a moral obligation … let’s not do it,”
then, “But consider the costs!,” then, “But think of the children!,” and so on.
Of course I know all of this is very important stuff, and worthy of careful
consideration, but I’m not sure how much of it I can watch. Part of me wanted to reach through the screen and pull the
trigger so we could just get on with our lives.
I guess that is the point, though. This stuff is not
comfortable. It is easier to just go home, like a drone pilot after a hard
day’s work, than it is to stay engaged with the tough issues. In a sense, we are the eyes in the sky, observing
what is going on. We can and often do just turn a blind eye—embracing our
detachment from bombs going off in East Africa, the Middle East, or wherever. But
that hardly frees us from guilt.
This is all interesting stuff. And the whole point about our
detachment from the carnage we inflict deserves careful attention. But a lot of
this does not come through very vividly in “Eye in the Sky”. To me, the movie comes
across as either, or sometimes both, of two extremes: Either glorifying
military leaders for taking collateral damage super duper seriously, or as pushing
a very naïve, hula-hoopers-must-not-die critique of war. And, even setting
aside the philosophical flat-footedness here, all this really does detract from
how compelling the story is. So, one way or another, “Eye in the Sky” ends up
falling short.
