A compelling look at the US war on terror
THE GOOD KILL. Directed by Andrew Niccol, with Ethan Hawke, Bruce Greenwood, Zoe Kravitz, Jake Abel, January Jones, Dylan Kenin, Zion Leyba, Michael Sheets, Ross Shaw and Peter Coyote.
Drawing wide commentary, ISIS directly name checked President Barack Obama. Given that the US government’s policies are viewed with a critical eye in Good Kill – above all the CIA’s involvement in military missions – Niccol’s film provides plenty of editorial fodder and provocative food for thought. That should expedite its flight path from back-to-back Venice and Toronto bows into theatres.
Excluding the beguiling sui generis excursion of his collaborations with Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke’s reunion with his director on 1997’s bigbrain, retro-futuristic sci-fi thriller Gattaca, as well as 2005’s more satirical take on the morality of armed conflict, Lord of War, yields the actor’s best screen role in years.
Hawke plays Major Tom Egan, a US Air Force pilot with six tours of duty under his belt. He’s chafing to get out of the sweatbox container where he’s been stationed just outside Las Vegas, and return to an actual “theatre of operation”. His wife Molly (January Jones), a knockout former dancer, welcomes his removal from the conflict zone, even if Tom’s gnawing frustration makes him more distant now than when he was home between tours.
The pep talks of commanding officer Lieutenant-Colonel Johns (Bruce Greenwood) suggest that Tom’s time in the air makes him an anomaly among a bunch of kids recruited for their videogamer skills. As they step behind a metal door bearing a sign that reads “You Are Now Leaving the USA”, Tom, his new co-pilot Airman Vera Suarez (Zoe Kravitz), and gung-ho backup technicians Zimmer (Jake Abel) and Christie (Dylan Kenin) take up their positions at computers on which they monitor suspected Taliban activity in Afghanistan, Pakistan and, later, Yemen.
The sobering PlayStation parallels will be lost on no one watching as Tom pushes a button and a screen image of a weapons warehouse, a residence or a vehicle carrying Taliban soldiers vanishes in a cloud of smoke and rubble, on some occasions catching civilian casualties in the blast. Each “good kill,” as a clean hit is termed, costs $68 000 in taxpayer dollars. The film acknowledges, via Johns, that the Air Force cops a lot of flak from the public over drone warfare, with computerised missile planes now outnumbering manned aircraft.
Tom steadily unravels, from numb, vodka-fuelled efficiency to full-blown PTSD, triggered by a shift in base protocol whereby orders are to come directly from CIA headquarters in Langley. Peter Coyote provides the disembodied voice relaying instructions with emotionless authority. In unrecorded exchanges that officially never happened, the CIA steps up the aggressive strategy, targeting suspicious patterns of activity rather than confirmed suspects. While Tom, Johns and, especially, increasingly troubled Vera question their orders, Langley makes it clear that non-compliance is not an option.
Kravitz gets to show more range here than she has onscreen up to now, and while the hint of romantic frisson between Vera and Tom doesn’t add much, their shared qualms over the job feed into the film’s lucid scepticism.
But the core drama is the growing disconnect between Tom’s 12 hours a day of killing people by remote control and going home where he’s expected to be a husband and father, firing up the barbecue or helping his son (Zion Leyba) with math homework. The simmering friction with Jones’ loving yet borderline passiveaggressive Molly is smartly modulated. And the tightly contained nature of Hawke’s performance through most of the film makes his one shattering explosion of rage quite startling. This is a man who found it easier to rationalise his duty in a conflict zone than he does from the safety of a box in the desert.
Having long refused to discuss his work at home, giving Molly one more reason to feel shut out, Tom’s painful act of opening up to her after a particularly distraught day provides one of the film’s most affecting moments. But there’s heightened emotion just under the surface in every one of the fascinatingly detailed scenes depicting drone strikes. Niccol weighs the human toll on both aggressor and target with intelligence and compassion, while questioning whether technological warfare is inevitably destined to be an unending cycle.
The screenplay is not immune to overwritten passages in which subtext is forcefully articulated — notably from Greenwood’s principled commanding officer and from Abel’s insensitive jock, in favour of wiping out anything that looks even remotely like an enemy. But there’s psychological meat on the film’s bones, and a compelling cool-headedness to its blurring of the lines between terrorists and defenders of freedom. – Reuters/ Hollywood Reporter