The main reason I decided to see ‘Eye in the Sky‘ is called Helen Mirren. I am an unconditional admirer of this actress who has never disappointed me, not even in the movies that did not deserve her. The 2015 film by South African director Gavin Hood was a pleasant surprise. I had no great hopes, because the trailers and comments I had read indicated that it was a military techno-thriller, a genre that I am not excited by. The presumptions were correct, but the film managed to captivate me first of all because it is very well made, and secondly because beyond the action plot it manages to create true situations and characters and raises interesting problems and dilemmas related to the morality of the military commands and of their execution in the fight against terrorism.
The screenplay written by Guy Hibbert spreads its heroes around the globe. Soldiers, officers and generals, politicians, lawyers and their secretaries, terrorists and innocent potential victims are located in Kenya, England,heartland USA, Singapore, China. They are brought together on the same screen or on the same screens by the video cameras installed on the spy planes and on the drones, which collect information about an imminent terrorist attack that can only be stopped by a preventive blow that risks producing collateral victims. Excellently made visually, well and fluently edited, ‘Eye in the Sky‘ is a successful combination of techno-thriller series like ‘Alias‘ and’ Stanley Kubrick‘s ‘Dr. Strangelove‘ with its command and decision rooms. The decisions made by politicians divided between ‘hawks’, ‘doves’ and those who hesitate in the middle have life and death consequences for those on the ground. It is one of the first films to raise the issue of the morality of actions in the fight against international terrorism and the impossibility of separating between the most advanced technologies (surveillance systems, drones, ‘precision’ weapons) and their consequences. Even if the credibility of the plot is debatable and from different points of view the approach may seem too critical or too idealized, I think the film has the merit of discussing these issues.
The team of actors does their job in an exemplary way. Helen Mirren, who has recently accustomed us to queen costumations, is credible as well in a role in uniform. The excellent Somali actor Barkhad Abdi plays another of the ‘local’ African roles that have become his specialty. Aaron Paul provides an emotional counterpoint in the role of an officer who does not limit to blindly carrying out orders. At the other end of the military scale we have Alan Rickman, in his last role on the big screens, unfortunately ending his career, but with a memorable line – “You never have to explain to a soldier what the price of war is.” It is a moral assertion that we can only hope that it’s understood by as many of the world’s military as possible.