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'Good Kill': War by remote control

Writer-director Andrew Niccol follows up his disappointing would-be blockbuster, The Host, with one of the most insightful films about the War on Terror since 9/11.

Ethan Hawke and January Jones in "Good Kill." (LOREY SEBASTIAN / IFC Films)
Ethan Hawke and January Jones in "Good Kill." (LOREY SEBASTIAN / IFC Films)Read more

Writer-director Andrew Niccol follows up his disappointing would-be blockbuster, The Host, with one of the most insightful films about the War on Terror since 9/11.

Good Kill targets America's use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The idea behind UAVs is simple, even elegant: They allow American forces to make clean, surgical strikes on known terrorist targets without incurring collateral damage on civilians or putting U.S. forces in mortal danger.

The reality, as the film shows, is far more complex. Based on reports of actual UAV missions in 2010, Good Kill argues that in the absence of proper oversight, even the most well-intentioned scheme can have disastrous results.

Ethan Hawke, who turned in a star performance in Niccol's 1997 feature premiere, Gattaca, stars as Air Force Maj. Thomas Egan, an experienced fighter pilot who finds himself assigned to one of the military's plum jobs: UAV operator.

Egan and a crew of three fly dozens of missions a week, delivering precision strikes to targets all over Afghanistan and Pakistan - and they do it in the comfort of an air-conditioned office in the Las Vegas desert.

"Blew away six Taliban in Pakistan just today," Egan tells an astonished convenience-store clerk. "Now, I'm going home to barbecue."

Touble is, Egan, who lives in the Vegas suburbs with his stunning wife, Molly (January Jones), and their two small children, is miserable.

A quiet, implosive man not given to kvetch, he tells his commander, Lt. Col. Jack Jones (Bruce Greenwood), that all he wants to do is fly real jets again.

Greenwood (The Captive) is terrific as a cynical senior officer who performs his duty with diligence, while also making cutting observations about the absurd nature of his job.

"War is now a first-person shooter," he tells a room full of twentysomethings recruited for the UAV program because of their facility with Xbox. "You pull the trigger here, it's for . . . real. It ain't a bunch of pixels you blow up. It's flesh and . . . blood."

Niccol's film treats the Air Force's program with respect, making sure we know that deadly action is taken only after there is ample evidence against a target.

The film, however, attacks the CIA, which takes over an increasing number of the missions. The agency appears in the form of a shadowy unnamed voice on the phone. It orders the Air Force brass to turn off the video recorder that keeps track of all missions. Rather than go after known combatants, CIA bosses have Egan kill people who simply display a suspicious pattern of behavior.

We see Egan and his co-pilot, Vera Sanchez (Zoë Kravitz), kill groups of civilians at a marketplace. They then are ordered to make a second strike to kill first responders. "Did we just commit a war crime?" Sanchez asks after one mission.

It's cheaper, Jones says, to kill than capture and interrogate suspected terrorrists.

"Don't ask me if this is a just war," he says. "That's not a question for us. To us, it's just war."

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