A very chilling game of drones
ANDREW NICCOL, the talented New Zealander who directed and scripted Good Kill, also wrote The Truman Show (1998), in which Jim Carrey played the poor sap who doesn’t realise that his entire life unfolds for the benefit of a TV audience.
This thought-provoking film explores a similar theme — the questionable morality of playing God by way of 24hour surveillance — except that here it is the lives of unsuspecting Afghans playing out on screens deep in a military compound just outside Las Vegas.
Ethan Hawke plays Major Tommy Egan, a U.S. air force pilot now charged with remote-controlling the many drones 10,000ft over Afghanistan, and with unleashing the fatal missiles when terrorist suspects are caught in the cross-hairs of their remarkably efficient sights. But Egan yearns for active combat, and can’t help but feel that he is doing something deeply unethical. Occasionally, inno- cent children wander into the sights after the missile has been released, but even when he registers a ‘good kill’ — meaning a clean wipe-out of the target — he feels morally compromised.
Hawke is terrific, and Bruce Greenwood is also splendid as his more gungho commanding officer, who announces to a gathering of new recruits (many of them picked up in shopping malls for their video-game skills) that the Afghans are starting to think of the drone as ‘their new national bird’.
No doubt deliberately, Niccol makes the killing seem prosaic, humdrum, in what is a fittingly unconventional war film to chronicle an alarmingly unconventional form of warfare. But it is also a psychological thriller, as Egan’s family life comes under increasing strain.
His wife is played by January Jones, who, coincidentally, is now back on TV in the final series of Mad Men, the show that propelled her into the big time.