Mary Ann B.

Piquero MAeD – EdMan

Movie Analysis/ Case Study: EYE IN THE SKY (2015)

“Eye in the Sky” explores a dilemma in the war against terror. A joint British-U.S. task force is
targeting a house in Kenya full of terrorists preparing for an imminent suicide bombing. Helen
Mirren’s character has an elusive terrorist in her grasp after six years of searching. With the
house in hostile territory, the only option is an airstrike. But a missile strike could likely kill a
girl selling bread outside the house. Should they strike? The struggle between the military and
political officials reveals the tension between the need for safety, public relations, the rights of
citizens, and the threat to innocent life.
The film begins with Colonel Katherine Powell, played tight-lipped and fiercely concentrated by
Helen Mirren, waking in the dim morning of Surrey, England. She has been tracking a pair of
British nationals affiliated with the East African jihadist organization Al-Shabaab for years, and
is on the verge of a breakthrough: her targets, along with a significant cadre of Al-Shabaab
leadership, will all be meeting together in one house to prepare their next bombings.
Lieutenant General Frank Benson, the late Alan Rickman's final onscreen role, appears out of
place as he struggles to find the perfect doll for his daughter on his way to a meeting room in
Whitehall. When he comes, he is accompanied by civic leaders – legal, foreign policy, and
domestic administrative professionals — rather than military personnel. On the other side of the
world, in the heat of the Nevada evening, drone pilots Steve Watts, played by Aaron Paul, and
Carrie Gershon, portrayed by Phoebe Fox, are chitchatting about their various origins and goals
in the Air Force. Barkhad Abdi, a criminally underappreciated Kenyan journalist, marvels at the
ludicrous sophistication of some James Bond-esque spy gear used by Kenyan special forces,
such as a robotic drone camera fashioned like a bug.
At this point in time, the audience becomes aware of the operation's astounding intricacy and
scale: military officers and special forces agents on three different continents are coordinating a
mission to the millisecond. The gut-wrenching revelation that this 21st-century precision cannot
account for every stray particle of disorder in something as dangerous as a counter-terrorism
operation is what ultimately makes the film so riveting. This is the film's aforementioned moral
quandary: when an adolescent girl named Alia wanders into the drone's kill zone to sell bread,
feet away from Kenya's most wanted, British and American operatives must decide whether to
almost certainly kill an innocent child or allow terrorists planning further harm to live. They let
strikes slide between their fingers. This is a conundrum that practically none of the film's
protagonists are prepared to face.
The portrayal of electronic warfare in Eye in the Sky is brutal. Technicians, diplomats, and star-
generals yell themselves hoarse looking for loopholes or debating out legal intricacies to fix the
problem (in a terrible twist of irony, one British secretary does so while suffering from an
explosive episode of food illness). One would be tempted to label this a philosophical quandary,
although there is little conceptually to discuss. Objectively, and in accordance with the tried-and-
true Spock concept of "the needs of the many," the missile should be fired, otherwise, the
militants in issue are free to strike populated public venues at their leisure, killing far more than
one person.
What appears to be more relevant to be argued in the film is how far humanitarian concerns
should be addressed within a military framework. Despite the fact that modern weapons are
propelled by binary sequences, a human finger must still pull the trigger. Former 82nd Airborne
Division paratrooper Daniel Kearns laconically remarked that engaging the US in a conventional
conflict would be "like a 3-year-old child playing chess against Gary Kasparov." For Aaron
Paul's character Watts, the reverse is the root of his powerlessness: the crystal clarity of the
vision he receives of Alia selling bread paralyzes him and gives the film's second half a frantic
stew of tension.
Are we willing as a civilization to unleash genuine hellfire in the shape of a heaven-born missile
on individuals who merely happen to be standing in the wrong place? Is this worth the
demeaning perspective it provides us, the computer-masters, and the nameless humans now
categorized as "collateral"? "What Eye in the Sky demonstrates is that the essence of war, and its
greedy demand for disregard for human life, stubbornly refuses to change, regardless of how
withdrawn those who pull the trigger are."