SPOILERS AHEAD:
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This year, the most timely war movie of the 2010s was released. Gavin Hood's “Eye in the Sky” finally answered the question of how to update this genre with the onset of drone warfare. The filmmakers' answer was not to resist the drone, but to accept it as a new norm. The resulting film, painstakingly documenting the process of the decisions that go into a drone strike, is not too far off from Pixar's aforementioned concept.
The “tough call” is a staple of the war movie. It's a genre almost defined by its images of hard-eyed men confronting dilemmas of uncertainty, of equally unpleasant options, and deciding, typically with action rather than inaction. In these films, the decisions occupy the seconds, maybe minutes, of screentime between the introduction of the choice, and the grunt's decision. Sometimes this results in a horrible mistake, forcing the soldier to confront his own complicity in the brutality of war. Sometimes it is simply taken as a necessary action in the face of the fog of war. But these types of decisions are always condensed to individual set pieces, leaving the focus on the decision-makers face and trigger finger to let viewers fill in the conflicting voices inside his head. Picture the fictionalized Chris Kyle in the scene which served as “American Sniper”'s trailer.
“Eye in the Sky” takes these voices and makes them tangible. The film does not literally show us the different colorful characters arguing inside a soldier's head, but rather, shows us the bureaucratic network of government officials, from multiple countries, whose back-and-forth in the external world ultimately decides whether or not the trigger will be pulled to launch a destructive missile thousands of miles away, leveling a building and blasting fiery debris into the surrounding streets.
But of course, this is all purposeful. By the time Jeremy Northam's minister refers up (the first of many such actions throughout the film) and the US Secretary of State is contacted, perhaps the rest of the audience was feeling as fatigued as I was, relating most directly to General Benson's weariness at the tedious bureaucracy surrounding the pulling of a single trigger. This made it especially jarring when the US Secretary gave his input – Powell has all the necessary permissions to launch, and the question is waste of his time. He quickly hangs up, gives the phone back to his startled assistant, and enthusiastically resumes his game of ping pong like the conversation never happened. Here, finally, is a bureaucrat who agrees with me, how obvious it is that action must be taken. And yet, this approval from above is the film's first direct hint that it will not be so staunchly pro-strike for the rest of its runtime. As frustrating it was to see the bureaucrats surrounding Benson argue against the strike, this was another thing entirely. Monica Dolan's Angela Northman, the most vocal anti-strike advocate in Benson's cabinet, serves as an antagonist for this first stretch because she insists on a non-violent resolution without knowing first-hand about the tactics she's dealing with. But here we see the US secretary, a man even further separated from the first-hand perspective, thoughtlessly declaring a death sentence on the targets. Naivety as a villain is suddenly overtaken by inhumanity.
Sure enough, shortly after the US secretary provides us with his jarring two cents and Powell gets her go-ahead, the film's real, central conflict emerges. A local young girl named Alia sets up shop on a vacant table, selling bread just feet away from the target structure. Alia is an almost hamfisted plot device, though the film effectively buffers this cynical interpretation through intimate scenes of the girl with her family, learning math and playing with a hula hoop in secret, resisting the repressive influence of the “fanatics” her father describes living outside the walls of their home. Nobody in the film wants Alia to die. In fact, the only character who is willing to allow it without significant moral qualms is our erstwhile protagonist, Colonel Powell.
From this point on, the decision to launch or not launch grows increasingly fraught and crowded with arguments. Steve Watts, the drone pilot (Aaron Paul, wisely cast after five years of experience grappling painfully with the immorality of seemingly utilitarian violence on Breaking Bad), has never launched a strike before, and refuses to pull the trigger unless he knows Alia has a solid chance of survival. Powell does her best to bend the truth around this subject, because she has done the math, and is willing to sacrifice Alia to save dozens of potential future victims of a suicide bombing.
Another bureaucrat in Benson's cabinet throws us a curve ball – if Alia is killed, Al Shabaab wins the propaganda war, whereas 80 deaths by suicide bomb will further villanize them. Here even Powell's calculated quantification of human life is outmatched in terms of callousness, and Alia's survival is twisted even further into that of a pawn in the chess game of public relations. For her part, Angela Northman's anti-violence position is unchanged, and even bolstered by the new circumstances – it may be a coincidence that she and Powell, the two most significant female players in the decision, are also the two who adhere to their respective, polar-opposite stances through thick and thin.
In contrast is Iain Glen's British Foreign Secretary, the most significant Pontius Pilate figure in a movie chock full of them. He is the one who first refers up to the US Secretary of State, at the time with the reasonable excuse of food poisoning affecting his decision-making capacities. He emerges from the bathroom later on, declaring that he feels better, and comes face to face with the Alia situation. He looks at the live footage, hears the arguments of all parties involved, and makes the clear-headed decision to make no decision, and refer up yet again.
Ultimately, this was a film with four possible endings. One: the strike is carried out, and Alia is killed. Two: the strike is carried out, and Alia survives. Three: the strike is called off, and the suicide bombers kill a market full of people. Four: the strike, is called off, and military forces stop the suicide bombers in time.
Of these four options, the even numbers must immediately be tossed out by any storyteller with a spine. To launch the strike without the casualty promised would be to immediately justify Powell's perspective as universally right, and toss out all the moral doubt raised by the situation, particularly by Watts. And to stop the suicide bombers without a drone strike would demonize Powell and elevate Watts and Northman to crusading heroes. In short, they would be miraculous Hollywood endings, each serving some hamfisted political agenda.
This leaves us with one of two options: Alia dies outside that house, or dozens of other innocents die in a market an hour later. And of these two, only one could really end the film that had been playing out up to that point. Earlier in this review, I described Alia as a plot device. And to an extent that is true, in the way she throws a wrench into the planned drone strike. However, when the film ends with her dying in said drone strike, she is elevated from that position. Alia is the point of the film, a child sacrificed in a calculated decision after calculated deliberation by numerous adults.
We could have seen Alia go home and solve the math problems she was struggling with, while miles away Al Shabaab massacred dozens of other innocents. But we had not just spent two hours with dozens of innocents, we spent them with Alia. To spare her would let us feel a little bit positive about a decision that let many die. Instead, we are left with an ending that leaves us with nothing but an intangible positive impact, an estimated number of potential Al Shabaab victims saved by the action, while we watch the very tangible Alia expire in a hospital.
So the strike killing Alia while successfully wiping out its targets is the only ending this film could have, because of its thesis: For all of the layered, careful, bureaucratic legal deliberation that goes into every action in surveillance-state warfare of the 21st century, the answers to difficult wartime questions are made no clearer. The only man who gets to walk away without blood on his hands is the man on the ground, Jama Farah (Barkhad Abdi), an almost classical hero in the midst of the murky ethical deliberation, who is only concerned with getting reliable intel and trying to get Alia out of the blast radius. While he is the only character whose life is in danger, he is also the only character whose conscience is not.
Everyone else might as well have been inside a single soldier's head while he decides whether to take a risky shot, for all the moral clarity they got from the facts from their advanced intel-gathering technology, and all the legal and political context their quick access to higher authorities, provided them. We live in a world where the military has access to supremely powerful technology, and simply has to decide what to do with it. The modern fog of war is not a logistical one, but an ethical one. It would almost have been cleaner if pilot Watts had to just make the call himself. Instead, the reverberations of the choice echo up through an entire ensemble. In the modern era, it takes a village to kill a child.
