Movie Review: 'Good Kill'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Good Kill is a rugged portrait of drone warfare, set at the time that it dramatically expanded, in 2010.
Ethan Hawke plays Major Thomas Egan, a U.S. Air Force pilot with six tours of duty flying F-16s behind him, now unhappily operating drones from the safety of a control room. He is severely disillusioned about the level of collateral damage that routinely occurs and which he feel powerless to control during airstrikes against places like Afghanistan and Pakistan and Yemen.
He's troubled by the ethics of his situation and yearns to get back in the cockpit of a real plane during actual aerial combat, where fear and adrenaline factor into every encounter.
Instead, he sits in a sterile, air-conditioned office in a trailer in the Las Vegas desert as part of the "Chair Force"and feels downright cowardly about the way he now conducts his "missions": by yanking on a joystick and pushing buttons, flying unmanned planes, dropping bombs, and then counting corpses. This killing by remote control feels a heck of a lot more like participating in a video game than actually engaging in combat.
And yet there are real lives at stake in the morally dubious assignments that the CIA hands down to Egan and his crew, which includes Bruce Greenwood as his commander, who makes the case for why no matter how much the soldiers may disapprove of their orders, there is no sensible alternative to carrying them out; and Zoe Kravitz as a junior officer who understands what Egan is going through and, as the only woman on the team, sees through different eyes than her male colleagues.
January Jones plays his wife and the mother of his two children, who are about the same age as some of the children whom he has watched die during drone airstrikes. She's very much aware of his heavy drinking and that her husband's job dissatisfaction and general unhappiness is seriously affecting their marriage.
Writer-director Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, SimOne, Lord of War, In Time, The Host), who also wrote The Truman Show, remains interested in the way technology affects humanity. But he presents both the case for and the case against drone warfare. That is, he's here to not only show us what these soldiers are doing and why but to suggest ways in which it is dehumanizing them.
Hawke's portrait of an anguished soldier coming undone because of an understandably guilty conscience is a solid one, memorably haunting.
Given their shared concerns, American Sniper and The Hurt Locker can't help but come to mind while viewing Good Kill. And while the latter doesn't have quite the impact of those two strong military dramas, it at least earns its stripes as a companion piece and deserves to be part of the important dialogue about drone warfare that we should be having.
Good Kill is nothing if not timely and thought-provoking.
So we'll strike 2½ stars out of 4 for a thoughtful and maybe even urgent modern war drama. Good Kill explores whether we should bemoan the use of the drone.
