Droning On: EYE IN THE SKY

War is hell. This is a constant truth. Drones are merely the freshest form this hell takes, innovation that serves to remove combat decisions from their immediate consequences by replacing a pull of a trigger with the click of a button. And yet it also enhances and broadens ethical questions and feelings of culpability when the actions of these flying death machines are the result of a large number of personnel debating, justifying, and ultimately enacting this new art of war. Eye in the Sky is not the first film to take drone warfare as its subject, but it’s the most effective and sustained look at the matter to date. This is a film clearly, cleverly committed to considering the methods and morality of modern war from several vantage points, watching as actions are slowly decided upon as the direct results of difficult questions. Is it reasonable to do a terrible thing to prevent something worse? Perhaps. But the variables aren’t so simple or easily predictable.

Director Gavin Hood, drawn to scenarios where means only justify the ends through cold calculation or strategic ignorance (from his War-on-Terror muckraker Rendition, to glum sci-fi Ender’s Game, and even the best moments of his studio-muddled X-Men Origins: Wolverine), here works with screenwriter Guy Hibbert to crisply and quickly focus on one dramatic moment with expertly sustained tension. There’s a house in Nairobi where high-value targets will be meeting new recruits. From a command center in England, a determined colonel (Helen Mirren) is watching a live-feed from the drone over the targets’ location. She’s sharing this with her commanding officer (Alan Rickman), who is huddled behind closed doors in London with a legal team. They’re all triangulating resources with Kenyan military, which has an operative (Barkhad Abdi) in the field. The drone itself is on loan from the United States Air Force, technicians (Aaron Paul and Phoebe Fox) flying it from Las Vegas, data processed from a cubicle in Hawaii.

The Eye in the Sky is the vehicle for much dramatic hand wringing as facts on the ground change and intelligence flows up and down the chain of command with every new wrinkle. By narrowing the scope of the film to one particular flashpoint, it grounds its ethical and moral questions in fine specificity. It’s not tackling the entire idea of drone warfare, instead merely finding a story to illustrate the structure by which it’s executed, and the limitations of this process. It’s a productive lens. We see a variety of military and political figures drawn into the decision-making as the drone spies suicide vests being assembled – a clear target for a pre-emptive strike – and innocent, blameless civilians walking past the house – a clear reason to hold off on raining destruction from the sky. There’s a mixture of wariness and weariness, urgency and caution to the proceedings, as tension slowly grows, escalating with thoughts of impending tragedy of one kind or another.

It’s a film of grinding workmanlike competency in subject and approach. Cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos (Jack Ryan) uses simple shooting, which is cut together by editor Megan Gill (The Call) with tick-tock precision. The excellent cast inhabits blank professionals, flashes of personality tamped down by the severity of the events they’re confronting. They’re driven to do what they see is best for their jobs and countries, debating courses of action in clipped, terse, and tense exchanges. There’s a literal ticking bomb on the screens before them. The gravity of making the wrong call weighs heavily. But the movie never picks sides, allowing those outlining an argument for action and those advocating restraint to make good points. Yet a decision must be made. Hood blends simple dialogues with eerie aerial shots, floating from a drone’s-eye view over its targets. The source of so much conflict, the images it captures are of people simply going through their days, unaware their lives hang in the balance, their survival solely in the hands of military and diplomatic officials thousands of miles away.

There’s bleakly funny exasperation as the bureaucracy pulls ever more suits into the conversation, serious people with differing ideas and ideals nonetheless joined in figuring out how best to minimize the potential for explosions on the other side of the world. This disconnect is enhanced by the differences between Mirren and Rickman, full of gravitas as they sit in their chairs, and Paul, eye on the screen with his hand on the trigger, and Abdi, who sits across the street from the target warily sizing up the facts before him. There are varying levels of culpability, of engagement, all drawn together in an impressive and frightening web of surveillance, with data representing real human lives ping-ponging around a dozen monitors across every continent. Smartly done, Hood’s restraint makes the film all the more powerful and compelling, We don’t know much about these characters, and the filmmaking’s simplicity could probably do with a bit more deft density, but the unfussy declaration of its characters’ core humanity makes for a far more nuanced and troubling outcome. There are no easy answers and no good actions, only hard-fought reactions inevitably resulting in bad outcomes no matter what.

Bored Game: ENDER'S GAME

Ender’s Game recalls sci-fi movies of days gone by in which the future entails wearing matching jumpsuits, walking through glowing grey corridors, staring intently at touchscreens, and gravely contemplating strategy. Based on the novel of the same name by virulent homophobe (that’s putting it mildly and has little to no bearing on the content of the story, but needs to be said nonetheless) Orson Scott Card, the story takes place far in the future, some fifty years after aliens attacked our planet and were beaten back by man’s superior military might. Now young people are picked to enter Battle School, recruited and trained to eventually become military leaders who will take the battle back to the alien’s home world, where a preemptive strike will hopefully wipe out any chance of further conflict. There’s a tricky moral dilemma at the center of the narrative, but it’s underplayed here in a film that’s quickly obviously a self-serious Starship Troopers for dummies.

Our hero is one Ender Wiggins (Hugo’s Asa Butterfield), a boy we’re told early and often is the best there is. Scowling adults in military garb (Harrison Ford, Viola Davis, Nonso Anozie) are constantly talking with each other, marveling at how remarkable a student Ender is, how promising his abilities are, and how much of their hope for mankind rests on his shoulders. Ender bids a tearful goodbye to his beloved sister (Abigail Breslin) and is shipped off to Battle School, an orbiting space station with a nifty zero-gravity bubble in the middle, where the bulk of the film is given over to watching his classmates and him train, take classes, exercise, and learn to behave like the child army they’re to become. He meets kids who like him (Hailee Steinfeld, Aramis Knight) and kids who don’t like him (Moises Arias, Conor Carroll). But, as we know, Ender’s far and away the best student. Why? I don’t know, but all the characters keep saying it.

Maybe it’s not so obvious on the page, but on screen it’s clear that Ender is a terrible protagonist. I don’t mean that as a value judgment. It’s merely an assessment of my level of interest. He’s a scrawny, stoic kid blandly marched up the level of command, told every step of the promotional ladder that he’s something like a genius. He knows it, too. He’s just so vacant that when he takes strong stances – mouthing off to Ford or threatening to quit the program – it’s hard to tell where his character stops and his plot function begins. It’s a movie that values telling us about characters over letting the characters be. You could assemble a remarkable cast, and indeed the filmmakers have, but they can’t do much with material that involves characters telling each other about each other. By the time Ben Kingsley shows up covered in Maori tattoos and speaking in an Australian accent, it’s no surprise that he’s nothing more than yet another plot point.

The adaptation is written and directed by South African director Gavin Hood who won a Best Foreign Film Oscar for his modest Tsotsi in 2005 before going on to take the blame for the mess that became X-Men Origins: Wolverine. (The less said about that the better.) He’s bad at drawing connections between these characters. It’s not easy to see why we should care about relationships and supporting characters beyond the fact that they’re our main characters, played by likable actors and cute kids, and have hung around the plot for long enough to generate some familiarity. The visuals around them, though, are nice enough. Hood keeps things sleek and steady, making it an atypical production that would rather you see the action than feel the chaos. It’s a good choice. Even as my mind drifted during long scenes of exposition and flatly stated themes, it’s a film that always looks good, like something I would’ve totally loved when I was a 12-year-old.

The film was co-financed by visual effects company Digital Domain, the people responsible for such wonderments of effects work as Titanic, Pirates of the Caribbean, Apollo 13, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Tron Legacy, just to name a few. When Ender’s Game breaks away from the largely confined corridors of the Battle School, a place I took to thinking as Boring Space Hogwarts, the spaceships are generic sci-fi designs done up nicely. The climax, which involves hundreds of ships spiraling and swarming in deep space, is exciting and involving, which makes the dramas of kids and commanders in the dénouement resonate with a bit of a kick. Suddenly there’s meaning, and a real filmic charge, out of something we’ve seen acted out instead of having simply been told. That the story has indistinct politics and a fuzzy point of view allows the story to have its whiz-bang lightshow climax and make us feel bad about it too. Would that the whole film were as exciting as its final moments. 

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)

I’ve been suffering from a malaise of disappointment ever since walking out of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, so much so that I felt hesitant to write about it. The series has reached such heights (including X2, one of the best superhero movies ever made) that seeing it fall into so much dismaying mediocrity is disheartening. Some fans have complained about the dip in quality between the second and third installments. Wait until they see this.

There’s nothing wrong with the basic story. Wolverine is a cool character, played well by Hugh Jackman, and the movie’s loaded  with cool mutants. But the movie rushes forward like an abridged version of a story with more complexity than we are presented. Relationships between characters are confused, vague, and undefined. This is a rushed, simplistic, movie that trots out characters for a scene or two then hustles them to the sidelines or to their death. The ensemble has been the highlight of past X-Men films. Why keep these characters underused, especially if the extra screen-time isn’t going to be used toward doing more than barely sketching in Wolverine’s background?

The movie starts in 1845 with a soap-operatic scene of confused familial lineage that ends up having no bearing on the rest of the plot, other than to showcase a young Wolverine discovering his bony claws. Then we’re thrust into a montage of wars in which Wolverine and his brother (the future Sabretooth, played by a game Liev Schreiber) fight. It’s never exactly clear why they’re fighting but I just accepted it, not knowing that it signaled a lack of attention to detail that would plague the film throughout. After they get in trouble in Vietnam, the two mutant brothers are approached by General William Stryker (Danny Huston, taking over from X2’s Brian Cox) to join a Dirty-Dozen-style team of mutants for covert missions. The first scene involving the group (which includes mutants with vaguely-defined powers and personalities played by recognizable faces like Ryan Reynolds, will.i.am, and Dominic Monaghan) works fairly well. It moves with a zip and clarity that the movie can never replicate afterwards.

Wolverine quickly leaves the group and moves on until we catch up with him in love with a school teacher and working as a lumberjack. He’s pulled back into a revenge story after the school teacher is killed, a revenge story that’s only a little convoluted and involves injecting adamantium into his skeleton in a procedure presented with none of the visceral horror of the very brief flashbacks in the previous films. The dialogue is often obvious and clunky; the cinematography is equally uninspired. The movie races through its plot, strewing loose-ends and haphazard tie-ins trying to look and plan simultaneously backwards and forwards along its franchise trajectory.

Almost ten years ago, Bryan Singer directed X-Men. At the time, the chief criticism of the film was that it spent too much time explicating the powers and relationships of the various mutants before plunging into the plot. This movie, directed by Gavin Hood, of the slightly overrated Tsotsi and perfectly-rated Rendition, proves that the first film’s approach was correct. The first film, the first two films actually, slowly revealed mutant after mutant, plot-thread after plot-thread, carefully expanding the world of the franchise and grounding them in a slick, stylized reality with real-world (or a gleaming, Hollywood version thereof) sociopolitical ramifications to these mutants. Here, the movie has no consistent tone and dashes through melodrama and not-so-special effects with little style and less wit. These are colorful mutants in cool situations. Why isn’t it more fun?

It’s not an exactly awful film, but it's seriously underwhelming. I expect more from this franchise; at its best, the X-Men films are powerhouses of blended art and commerce (like the great string of superhero films last year which gave us Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, The Dark Knight, and Hellboy II). With the bar set so high, Wolverine had much farther to fall, making it even harder to watch as it failed to entertain me. What a way to start the summer movie season.