'Eye in the Sky' - Film review

Eye in the Sky is an international political thriller directed by Gavin Hood and starring Helen Mirren, Aaron Paul and the late, great Alan Rickman. It tells the story of a British military officer seeking authorisation for a drone strike in a foreign country on a British national.

The film is a hugely complex moral question based on a very simple premise, so its strength comes from the attention it gives to setting the stage and form the time it took to be intelligent, thoughtful and sensitive. Take for instance the news/documentary exposition on El Shabaab at the beginning of the film. This sequence stands out so much in contrast to the cliche of other more low-brow thrillers, exemplified perfectly by the breakfast scene in Olympus Has Fallen with the offhand reference to rising tensions on the Korean peninsular to create a vague sense of intrigue. There the news programme is used for the opposite purpose for which it's intended in the real world - to tantalise slightly, but mostly to leave the audience in the dark. Eye in the Sky totally turns this trope on its head in the opening sequence, as the news programme is probably the best way to get vital information across. What's more, this blatant exposition doesn't feel in anyway cynical, or rather its cynicism completely pays off as the film evolves requiring a well-informed audience.


There is a line in the film where a character demystifies for the audience that this entire movie boils down to a trolley problem - "either we kill a little girl or they kill 40 people" - and in a movie like Olympus Has Fallen the main action of this film would be a 30 second sequence (oh wait, that literally happened at the beginning of London Has Fallen? Oh, touché). However, Eye in the Sky tells a hugely complex moral story from this simple premise, by virtue of the audience having all the facts. In reality, the audience is the 'eye in the sky' as the scene jumps from location to location, uncovering new viewpoints and moral considerations. What makes the diplomacy of the situation so interesting is the number of people up the command chain who need to be consulted, how groupthink muddies the water and how their distance or proximity to ground zero affects judgement, and the water only gets muddier the more people there are stamping their feet.

Much like the old adage that a good teacher shouldn't teach students what to think, but how to think, Eye in the Sky is painfully unbiased and unideological, leaving the audience to squirm with the consequences of their biases and not offering them the easy way out of directoral moral intent. Every angle of the question is examined, from the people pulling the trigger, to the secretaries of state, to the local armed forces in Kenya to the people living across the street - it's perfectly structured to take you through a massive range of points of view and moral considerations, not telling you what to think but showing you what to think about. This unfiltered experience is disorientating as it conforms to and then subverts the expectations of any audience of whatever political persuasion. This film is guaranteed to pull the rug out from under you. There are no heroes or villains (among the actual characters, not including the terrorists who are more of an abstract threat than actual characters), the closest thing to a hero being an innocent, and again the film is perfect at showing how knowledge of the problem immediately strips any character of innocence, so that by the end of the film the only characters who could be thus considered are the girl and her dad living across the road in Nairobi.

Not very much happens, and yet it's incredibly tense throughout. Like I say, it's 30 seconds of a run-of-the-mill action film blown up into a feature-length question, but that expansion is a breaking down, an incisive analysis where every new piece of information makes the answer less, not more, clear-cut. This moral uncertainty is compounded by a very clever structuring of the plot where the characters are never in a position to do what we want them to do, or are revealed to be incompetent or have ulterior motives at every crucial turn. Mirren, the highlight of the film, is fantastic at portraying a tightly strung and dry-angry professional and having her at the centre of the story really projects onto the audience the sense of urgency for taking some action for her stake in her determination to track down the defected British citizen - which translates more as a quest for personal revenge than a military mission. This straining discord between Mirren's desire for action and a lack of action in reality is what creates the tension for the audience and craftily tricks one into internal conflict. You find yourself empathetically and impulsively straining for action along with Mirren's character before checking yourself on the consequences of what you would have them do. There was definitely a slightly humourous but not entirely ironic groan in my cinema when yet another character referred the decision upwards.

All of this rising tension and the almost excessive amounts of detail which have gone into building up the importance of the decision ensure that the climax is brutally unsatisfying. Maybe it was a metaphor for the futility of the revenge story in Mirren's character. Whatever the case, if the film was gradually increasing your irritation and reducing your reducing your patience then the final part is the suckerpunch which drops reality on your head like a tonne of bricks and makes you feel guilty for your petulance whilst still leaving room for moral ambiguity - even in the final moments none of the characters can be proven to have acted in moral evil and you have to wonder what the hospital scene would have been like in an alternate universe where the drone didn't fire and the little girl we feel such aching connection to went to the same market as the suicide bombers.

Mirren and Rickman are the absolute stars of the show portraying a dignity for characters who could very easily have been demonised in a story like this. Aaron Paul gave a good performance but not a stellar one here, not as good as his performances in Triple 9 and, of course, Breaking Bad, but still a sufficient show to portray the fraught emotions that his position calls for.

Eye in the Sky is a film which I would definitely recommend as a film which stands out head and shoulders above comparable film in its own genre and shows that cinema can be a medium for deep philosophical and moral questioning and examination.

4.5/5.

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