SECOND SCREEN
In less than 10 years, we’ve become familiar with drone warfare and almost blasé about the idea of dispensing death by remote control. Anything that gets the bad guys, right? That sort of thinking is challenged by Andrew Niccol’s Good Kill, an insightful drama that sheds a light on the extraordinary lives of those who ‘pilot’ these drones.
‘Rifle,’ confirms the pilot, as he squeezes the trigger on a joystick in a container on a Nevada desert airbase. And 10 seconds later, someone 7,000 miles away dies.
Ethan Hawke plays Tom Egan, an experienced pilot who’d rather be flying real planes but instead is living the sort of bizarre life where he can have killed a dozen people before teatime, then go home to his family in suburban Las Vegas.
No wonder he’s got bottles of vodka hidden all over and is plagued by mounting doubts about whether what he’s doing is really right. Especially once he’s taking orders from the CIA, and suddenly – in a story set in 2010 – the idea of ‘collateral damage’ is being redefined. He’s killing women, and children… and he’s not even sure he’s killing the right bad guys.
With Niccol drawing clever visual parallels between the Afghanistan and Las Vegas, and with top-drawer performances from Hawke and Bruce Greenwood as the base commander, this film aggressively challenges the prevailing wisdom… even if it doesn’t offer any obvious alternative.