Henry Barnes 

Good Kill: righteous take on US drone warfare – Toronto film festival review

The disconnect of American drone ops is perfectly captured, but the supporting cast’s characterisations are one-dimensional, writes Henry Barnes
  
  

Good Kill
Trigger happy … Good Kill Photograph: PR

The euphemistic title says it all: it’s about drone warfare and this righteous drama’s take on it. The military jargon is bogus and insulting. There is, of course, no such thing as a “good kill”. Andrew Niccol’s drama will remind you of that, repeatedly.

Ethan Hawke plays Major Tom Egan. He’s a former fighter pilot and an outdated piece of tech. The air force doesn’t need top guns, it needs drone ops, so Egan is ousted from his cockpit, retasked as the leader of a team trained to kill the enemy from 7,000 miles away. They sit in a shipping container, miles outside Las Vegas. They line up the target, run through the protocols and pull a joystick trigger. Splash. Good kill. They count the bodies as the smoke clears in Pakistan or Yemen or Somalia or Afghanistan. Then Tom takes his Pontiac back to the suburbs for barbecue and beer.

Niccol takes a stern tack with Good Kill. Again and again Egan and team do their job. Again and again they’re coached in ignoring the true nature of it. The drones are saving American lives, never mind what the bleeding hearts think. “Drones aren’t going anywhere,” says their commander (Bruce Greenwood). “In fact, they’re going everywhere.” The repetition of their roles drills into the characters and the audience. We get bored of watching foreign people get blown up on screen too. This feeling of disassociation between the act of pushing the button and the act of murder is exactly what the director is aiming for.

Cinematographer Amir Mokri (director of photography on Lord of War, Niccol’s satire on the international arms trade) shoots the Vegas desert in a harsh, sterile light. The Las Vegas suburbs, shot from the sky, look as dusty and alien as the places Egan sees on his monitor. It plays into Egan’s isolation. He is distant from his wife (Mad Men’s January Jones) and drinks too much since he lost his flying privileges. He’s got the creeping feeling that drone warfare is cowardly and misses the fear of being in danger. “We’ve got no skin in the game,” he says. His wife says she’s glad to have him home with the kids. Egan zones out and stares at the sky.

Niccol creates an atmosphere that is airless and dull, an unusual tone for a modern war film, but one that fits the subject matter perfectly. That would have been enough, but the director feels the need to make his polemic on drone warfare plain. He sets up the team as an ethics debate meet. On one side is Egan and Suarez (Zoë Kravitz), a young female recruit with a conscience. On the other are two knuckleheads with kill boners. They ridicule the idea that they’re doing anything but protecting their country from terrorist threat. Niccol’s script goes too far in singling them out as the idiots. Kravitz’s character, more left-wing and articulate on post-9/11 military mandate, also comes across as one-dimensional. The supporting cast’s characterisations become stupefying in themselves. All talk and no stand taken. Perhaps that’s the point.

After identifying its target, Good Kill lets its aim wobble. It shoots for more than procedural, which is where its strength lay in the first place. An audience engaged with the issue may well find the romantic dramas between Hawke and Kravitz and Hawke and Jones start to detract from the message. But perhaps these hooks are necessary to pull in a wider audience. Good Kill runs through the rituals of military slaughter. It dehumanises the combatant and underlines the inhuman

nature of collateral damage and strikes based on pattern behaviour (“Everyone carries an AK-47 there,” says Suarez. “What about their right to bear arms?”). It’s often slow and occasionally simplistic, but at least someone’s talking about the issue.

Egan’s mental state drifts as the CIA assume command of his team. They have special operations that won’t be recorded, because they never existed. The orders start coming from a speakerphone. The parameters over who’s fair game widen. A red light announces when Langley is on the line. The machine tells the people to use their machines to kill people. The killer and the killed remain disconnected.

 

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