We bomb because we care

Joe questions the premise of Eye in the Sky

If you like the kind of thriller where stuff gets blown up and no one has time to count the bodies, you’ll be disappointed with Eye in the Sky. Writer Guy Hibbert and director Gavin Hood make us wait for most of the film while an expanding circle of military and political figures agonise over whether to authorise a single precision drone strike and how to minimise the human cost. The result is more like a seminar in moral philosophy than an updated Airforce One.

The set-up is designed to present an excruciatingly balanced ethical conundrum. In response to information that senior figures in the East African terrorist group Al-Shabaab will be gathering in Nairobi, Colonel Katherine Powell (Helen Mirren) is directing an operation by Kenyan ground troops to pick them up. When the terrorist meeting is moved to a house inside a camp controlled by extremists, a no-go area for the military, Powell sees no alternative to a drone strike.

Overseeing this operation from Whitehall is Powell’s commanding officer, Lieutenant General Frank Benson (Alan Rickman), the British Attorney General, and a couple of government ministers. From a US air force base outside Las Vegas, two young American drone pilots operate the “eye in the sky” of the film’s title and wait for instructions.

Meanwhile the stakes are rising on both sides of the question. It turns out Powell has in her sights not only three “high-value targets”, identified as numbers 2, 3 and 5 on the US President’s East Africa kill list, but also two suicide bombers who are even now suiting up to go out and create carnage in some public place at an estimated cost of 80 lives. Who could resist zapping the lot of them in one go? Random deaths will be limited to a small area around the house. But a child, who has previously been observed playing safely in her own back yard, sets up a stall in the street selling bread. For all those watching the live footage this girl’s fate becomes the central question. Can they strike without killing or injuring her? Should they strike anyway?

At the level of human drama, the film is absorbing. But I found myself increasingly distracted by a feeling that the debate was skewed. In their charismatic performances, Mirren and Rickman seem to represent the military at its most admirable, doing what has to be done to keep us safe. The US politicians, who appear only briefly, are cartoonishly gung-ho. It’s left to the British politicians, agonising over biscuits and coffee in their plush Whitehall office, to consider the case against action. But they’re a weaselly bunch, worrying how they’ll explain themselves on the Today Programme if it all goes wrong and the footage is leaked to you tube. Rickman, required to seek ever higher clearance, gives a characteristic performance of deadpan disdain (sadly his last). This raised uneasy chuckles from the elderly matinee audience in the Clapham Picturehouse. I imagine less thoughtful audiences might howl with derisive laughter at the cowardly buck-passing. But this isn’t an episode of The Thick of it: these politicians are clearly sweating their way through a dilemma that has a moral dimension for them as well as a political one.

It occurred to me only afterwards that the way the film maintains the illusion of balance is by piling up the rational case in favour of the drone strike and the emotional case against.

The argument for saving the child, played enchantingly by Aisha Takow, is given emotional weight for the audience who get to know her at ground level. We learn that her father does nothing more dangerous for a living than mending bicycles, that her mother bakes the bread that she sells in the market, and that they are explicitly not “fanatics”, the term her father uses for their neighbours. In the privacy of the home, she studies maths and in the yard she plays charmingly with a hula hoop, though her hula-hooping, like her schoolbooks, must be hidden from visitors. All of which makes her, and her parents, effortlessly appealing to a Western audience, while adding nothing to the moral case for protecting her. 

Rickman’s character, resistant to such sentimental concerns, takes the pragmatic view: “Save her and risk killing 80 others.” The nearest thing we get to an answer comes from one of the British politicians: “If Al-Shabaab kills 80 people, we win the propaganda war. If we kill one child, they do.” This is a powerful argument fatally weakened by its acceptance of the General’s assumption that drone strikes save lies – calculably and immediately. No one in the film questions this, nor the long-term strategy of assassinating replaceable individuals while alienating civilian populations who must live under the constant threat of random aerial attack. 

   

It’s a junior minister, played engagingly by Monica Dolan, who offers the most consistent objection on moral grounds, but the script gives her nothing to say in response to Rickman’s sonorous last words: “Never tell a soldier that he does not know the cost of war”. This final stand-off between the agitated, damp-eyed civilian woman and the sorrowfully determined General symbolises the heart-versus-head premise on which the film is constructed.

Persuasively written, superbly acted, convincing in its procedural details, Eye in the Sky left me feeling emotional manipulated and intellectually bamboozled. The argument for risking the child’s life is unrealistically contrived. The give-away is the addition of the suicide bombers and the confident estimate of 80 imminent deaths. In the war we are conducting with daily drone strikes in many countries, how often, I wonder, does a drone pilot have in his sights a suicide bomber on the point of detonating his vest? We’ve become used to the justification for torture that was regularly represented in Fox’s long-running series, 24. Wouldn’t you torture someone if he could direct you to a bomb in time for you to defuse it? This film seems to offer an equivalent defence of drone strikes.

In the desperate circumstance presented in this story, a little corruption seems justified. When Mirren’s character, having struggled conscientiously throughout to do what’s best, makes the first move towards a cover-up, I felt invited to consider the lonely burden of responsibility carried by those charged with protecting us, because, as another fictional colonel once famously remarked, we can’t handle the truth. Sadly there’s no one in this film with the eloquence or the stature to challenge that dangerous falsehood.  

And after the General has had his say and the verbal debate is over, it’s only the closing wordless sequences, in a hospital in Nairobi and on an Air Force base in Nevada, that suggest the devastating cost of such actions – to the innocent victims, of course, and to the anti-terrorist cause, but also, less obviously, to those who fire the missiles in our name from a distance that keeps them physically safe but cannot protect them from the emotional and moral cost of what they are required to do.