Movie Review - Eye in the Sky

Eye in the Sky (2016)

Starring Helen Mirren, Aaron Paul, Barkhad Abdi, Aisha Takow, and Alan Rickman

Directed by Gavin Hood

***This film is currently streaming via Amazon Prime***

In this day and age, the concept of war has shifted from the wide-scale, massive WWII-era attacks against an enemy's large army to a more intimate form of battle where individual terrorists may be targeted in a one-on-one-type tête-a-tête.  This smaller scale level of attack is being even further amplified by the usage of drones -- an eye in the sky that permits us to see things in a more secretive manner.  This new wartime assistant is the subject of director Gavin Hood's Eye in the Sky, a movie that despite being ninety percent talkative exposition somehow manages to create a surprising amount of tension.

British Army colonel Katherine Powell (Helen Mirren) has received the news that a British woman-turned-Islamic terrorist along with her husband are meeting several high ranking leaders of a terrorist group at a safehouse in Kenya.  Desperate to catch the traitor, Katherine and the British Army team up with the Americans to utilize drones in order to confirm the woman's presence so they can try and take her out.  However, morality comes into play when it's discovered that bombing the Kenyan safehouse would also harm innocent civilians including a young girl (Aisha Takow) who is selling bread outside the home.

The uniqueness of Eye in the Sky comes from the morality play that's depicted in the film.  Can we kill innocent civilians in order to take out known terrorists?  This conundrum plays out for almost the entirety of Eye in the Sky and the talkative pros and cons yield a surprisingly tense experience.  All of the characters -- Mirren as the Army colonel, Alan Rickman as a British Defense Ministry higher-up, Aaron Paul as a conflicted American soldier having difficulty coming to grips with the notion of possibly killing an innocent child, Barkhad Abdi as an undercover British operative who is onsite in Kenya -- never interact with one another onscreen at the same time.  They're all in different locations across the world and thus are only interacting via phone or video chat and yet, with much kudos to director Gavin Hood, their interactions feel believable and shockingly tense.

I must admit that I didn't expect a whole lot from Eye in the Sky, but I found that it more than delivered on creating an exciting environment, showing us an insider look at an aspect of modern-day warfare with which the public may be unfamiliar.

The RyMickey Rating:  B