Taglines: The longer you watch, the less clearly you see.
Colonel Katherine Powell leads a secret drone mission to capture a terrorist group living in a safehouse in Nairobi, Kenya. When Powell learns that the group plans to carry out a suicide attack, her objective is changed to kill the terrorists. Drone pilot Steve Watts targets the safehouse for destruction but reports a nine-year-old girl entering the kill zone. Powell contacts politicians and lawyers to determine whether or not to take action.
Eye in the Sky is a 2015 British thriller film starring Helen Mirren, Aaron Paul, Alan Rickman and Barkhad Abdi. The film, directed by Gavin Hood based on a screenplay by Guy Hibbert, highlights the ethical challenges of drone warfare. Filming began in South Africa in September 2014.
The film premiered at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival on 11 September 2015. Bleecker Street distributed the film in cinemas in the United States with a limited release on 11 March 2016 and then a wide release on 1 April. It is the last live action film to feature Alan Rickman, who died in January 2016. The end credits state that the movie is dedicated to Rickman “in loving memory”.
About the Story
The film opens in Nairobi, Kenya, where Alia Mo’Allim, a young girl, twirls a hula hoop made by her father in their backyard.
British Army Colonel Katherine Powell wakes up early in the morning and hears that an undercover British/Kenyan agent has been murdered by the Al-Shabaab group. From Northwood Headquarters she takes command of a mission to capture three of the ten highest-level Al-Shabaab leaders, who are meeting in a safehouse in Nairobi. These include a British couple, Susan Helen Danford (based on Samantha Lewthwaite) and her husband.
A multinational team works on the capture mission, linked together by video and voice systems. Aerial surveillance is provided by a USAF MQ-9 Reaper drone controlled from Creech Air Force Base in Nevada by USAF pilot, 2d Lt Steve Watts. Undercover Kenyan field agents, including Jama Farah, use short-range ornithopter and insectothopter cameras to link in ground intelligence. Kenyan special forces are positioned nearby to make the arrest. Facial recognition to identify human targets is done at Joint Intelligence Center Pacific at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The mission is supervised in the United Kingdom by a COBRA meeting that includes British Lieutenant General Frank Benson, two full government ministers and a ministerial under-secretary.
Farah discovers that the three high-level targets are now arming two suicide bombers (one is American) for what is presumed to be an attack on a civilian target. Powell decides that the imminent bombing changes the mission objective from “capture” to “kill”. She informs drone pilot Watts to prepare a precision Hellfire missile attack on the building, and solicits the opinion of her British Army legal counsel. To her frustration, her counsel advises her to seek approval from superiors.
Benson asks permission from the COBRA members. Citing conflicting legal and political views and contrasting the tactical value of the assassination with the negative publicity of killing civilians and the status of some of the targets as American or British nationals, they fail to reach a decision and refer the question up to the UK Foreign Secretary, presently on a trade mission to Singapore. He does not offer a definite answer and defers to the US Secretary of State, presently on a cultural exchange in Beijing, who immediately declares the American suicide bomber an enemy of the state. The Foreign Secretary then insists that COBRA take due diligence to minimise collateral damage.
Alia, who lives next door, is now near the target building selling her mother’s bread. The senior military personnel argue the risk of letting three high-level terrorist leaders, and two real-time suicide bombers, leave the house. The lawyers and politicians involved in the chain of command argue the personal, political and legal merits of and justification for launching a Hellfire missile attack in a friendly country not at war with the US or UK, with the significant risk of collateral damage. Watts and his enlisted sensor operator, A1C Carrie Gershon, can see the more direct risk of little Alia selling bread outside the targeted building, and they seek to delay firing the missile until she moves.
Eye in the Sky
Directed by: Gavin Hood
Starring: Helen Mirren, Aaron Paul, Alan Rickman, Barkhad Abdi, Jeremy Northam, Phoebe Fox, Kim Engelbrecht, Meganne Young, Monica Dolan, Iain Glen
Screenplay by: Gavin Hood
Production Design by: Johnny Breedt
Cinematography by: Haris Zambarloukos
Film Editing by: Megan Gill
Costume Design by: Ruy Filipe
Set Decoration by: Fred Du Preez
Music by: Paul Hepker, Mark Kilian
MPAA Rating: R for some violent images and language.
Studio: Entertainment One
Release Date: March 11, 2016
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