Directed by Gavin Hood
Country: UK
Helen Mirren gives another remarkably centered performance in “Eye in the Sky”, where she plays Col. Katherine Powell, a military officer in command of an operation to capture terrorists in Kenya.
The intelligence has strong reasons to believe that a dangerous woman called Susan Helen Danford, a British citizen now radicalized by the terrorist group Al-Shabaab, is hidden with her radical husband in Nairobi where they lead terrorist attacks from a well-identified house.
From the Northwood Headquarters in the UK, Powell supervises the delicate multinational mission, counting on the information provided by the American drone surveillance team that operates from Nevada, and Farah (Barkhad Abdi), a Kenyan undercover agent who is stationed in Nairobi and controls a spy insectothopter (a miniature drone with the form and size of a dragonfly) that is intended to invade the terrorists’ refuge.
Besides confirming Danford’s identity, the drone also shows that a suicide attack is about to be carried out. This particular circumstance impels Col. Powell to modify the mission’s classification from ‘capture’ to ‘kill’.
After a complicated process to get clearance from her superiors, Powell proceeds with the mission, instructing the USAF pilot Steve Watts (Aaron Paul) to advance with his Reaper drone and destroy the target.
However, Watts sees a little girl selling bread right in front of the house and refuses to obey the orders.
Negotiations begin in order to minimize collateral damage, but assuring that the terrorists don't escape. Question: Does the life of an innocent child worth more than the death of these priority targets?
Slightly better than “Good Kill”, Andrew Niccol’s 2014 drone thriller, “Eye in the Sky” is imbued of a tension that is already familiar.
Director Gavin Hood (“Tsotsi”), working from a screenplay by Guy Hibbert, seemed to have planned everything so that the ending could reach our hearts. Despite this sensation, the film succeeds by presenting two valid sides: one didactic, which shows today’s modern technology and warfare clinical procedures; and another, far more unsettling, that shows little respect for human lives.
