Good Kill - film review: Ethan Hawke gives a great performance

This portrayal of a drone pilot bombing Taliban targets without leaving the office convincingly shows us progression in warfare, says David Sexton
Drone zone: Ethan Hawke cracks under the pressure of remote killing
David Sexton13 April 2015

It’s 2010 and America is increasingly using drones to fight the war in Afghanistan. Major Tommy Egan (Ethan Hawke) used to be a regular fighter pilot with six tours of duty in F-16s in Iraq. Now he flies UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) from an air-conditioned box in the Nevada desert, blasting Taliban targets with Hellfire missiles, at a cost of $68,000 each but no risk to his own life, before driving home in his sports car to his wife (January Jones, Betty Draper in Mad Men) and their two children. He can’t talk about what he does and their marriage is in trouble.

Tommy’s an ace but he’s increasingly stressed by what he’s doing, hitting the vodka first thing in the morning, yearning to be back in action in a real plane. “I miss the fear,” he says. “I feel like a coward every day. The worst thing that can happen to me is carpal tunnel syndrome or spilling coffee in my lap. The most dangerous thing I get to do is drive home on the freeway.”

Although he has qualms about the morality of these remote strikes and the inevitability of collateral damage, it’s this asymmetry that’s really getting to him. “You haven’t got any skin in the game.”

The view from above of Waziristan, 7,000 miles away, is clear and the execution of the strikes weirdly formulaic and repetitive: “Rifle when ready. Target laser. Three, two, one. Rifle. Missile away. Time of flight 10 seconds. Splash. Good kill!” During those 10 seconds, in one of the attacks, a child wanders into the target zone. Tommy’s commander (Bruce Greenwood, formidable) tells him just to keep on compartmentalising. “Wrong place, wrong time — it happens.”

Tommy’s co-pilot on these missions burns out at 24, though, failing a drugs test. His replacement is the ridiculously young and stunning Suarez (Zoe Kravitz), who quickly falls out with the more gung-ho members of the unit and questions the strikes. “Was that a war crime, Sir?” she asks after one hit. “Shut the f**k up, Suarez,” she’s told. Others in the unit have no such doubts. The target is TARFU, one jeers — Totally And Royally F**ked Up. “I count six, Sir — but good luck figuring out which bits go into which casket”.

Then the team start taking their orders direct from “Christians In Action”, the CIA, known just as “Langley”, and new rules of engagement come into force. Targets are hit again when rescuers come in after the first strike. It is determined to be “militarily more effective to eliminate a group than an individual” and it is accepted that innocent bystanders will die. Operations take place on the balance of probabilities, not certainty, and are extended to countries such as Yemen where the US is not officially operating (“out of necessity the war on terror has become borderless”), while being smothered in euphemism (“permission to prosecute” being an order to kill). Increasingly, their missions are off the books — and Tommy is starting to go seriously off the rails.

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This is a great performance by Hawke as a dedicated pilot whose response to stress is to tough it out, to refuse help, to screw up his 1,000-mile stare even tighter and hit the bottle. He remains sympathetic, even though his wife is right to say he’s left her, not she him.

Good Kill is written, directed and produced by Andrew Niccol, whose first film was Gattaca (1997), also starring Hawke, already strangely dated science fiction about a future in which genetics determine life chances and Hawke has to fake his whole identity, right down to his DNA, to fulfil his ambition of becoming an astronaut. He then went on to write and co-produce The Truman Show (1998), although it was directed by Peter Weir, in which Truman gradually realises that his life has been faked for a reality TV show.

So he’s interested in what it feels like for your whole life to be inauthentic, to be a product of surveillance, technologically governed. Good Kill takes this interest into the real world of remote warfare — and it is admirably disciplined in its approach, stingingly scripted and rigorously executed.

We see a lot of killing in Afghanistan but only from the air, on the screens — there is no ground footage. Nor do we actually see the drones fly. As the film progresses we increasingly see the Nevada desert where Tommy lives and works from the air, as if monitored by a drone, too, and the boxy housing estate where he lives his simulacrum of a home life is seen from the same perspective as the houses and compounds he is striking on the other side of the world.

Good Kill is “based on actual events”, we’re assured. It’s perhaps based a little on the 2012 testimony of Brandon Bryant, a drone operator for five years, who described just such an experience of seeing a child walk onto his screen just before the missile’s impact and began to crack up, cited in a terrific new book, Drone Theory, by the French philosophical writer Grégoire Chamayou (Penguin, £6.99).

Chamayou does a lot of necessary work here in examining the moral implications of robot warfare, which has so far outstripped our understanding through the rapid advance of technology. He takes his lead from Simone Weil’s injunction that it’s a mistake to approach warfare “in terms of the end pursued and not by the nature of the means employed” — among the topics he discusses is the psychological effect on the operators who, unlike previous combatants, are physically invulnerable, unseen and removed; at home while actually at war.

It’s this that Niccol presents so vividly in Good Kill. Stopping off at the liquor store on the way home, Tommy’s uniform is ridiculed by the kid behind the counter. “You ever get to fly in a war?” he asks. “I blew away six Taliban in Pakistan just today — now I’m going home to barbecue,” Tommy replies.

But that disjunction proves to be more than he can live with. Good Kill convincingly shows us a development in warfare that’s only going to become ever more important, one that we’ve been preferring not to think too much about.

15, 102min

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