This is a movie about a man who is a drone pilot. The movie was made by the same director, Andrew Niccol, who made the Nick Cage vehicle, Lord of War, as well as cult favorite Gattaca, and this is another Ethan Hawke vehicle more or less. Hawke plays Major Thomas Egan. Tony Scott was supposed to make a sequel to Top Gun about this subject- the transition from the the shit-hot fighter pilot mentality to the 9-5 job drone warfare. Tony Scott never completed this project, however, because he killed himself.
Hawke’s co-pilot, Zoe Kravitz plays Airman Vera Suarez, who wants to have an affair with the Major and is concerned about how the drone missions authorized by the CIA become more and more ridiculous, resulting in higher and higher body-counts. Egan’s family is collapsing because he can’t identify with anything anymore, since he just wants to get back to flying F-16s, but like Catch-22, the USAF keeps postponing his transfer. Bruce Greenwood plays the drone crew commander who doesn’t like the new order but basically just keeps doing what he’s told. Peter Coyote plays the disembodied voice of the CIA handler who dispatches the kill-missions. The drone crew hate their job but since flight-hours have been cut back and because the aeronautics college student drop-outs that end up running the drone sorties can’t tell reality from fantasy anyway, they predictably spend most of their time voyeuristicaly observing their targets and living bizarre surrogate lives through their victims.
Although once and a while the crew gets to complete a “good” assignment such as covering a patrol in Afghanistan, most of the missions leave them feeling hollow or disturbed at the contradiction of their godlike power but also impotence. They can kill a bunch of people in a market in Pakistan, but they can’t stop a rape from happening in an out of the way village, or intervene in any meaningful way when NATO soldiers get blown up by IEDs. Egan lives in some cookie cutter bourgeoisie suburb nightmare in Las Vegas and basically drowns his sorrows in alcoholism. He can’t connect with his wife, Molly, played brilliantly by January Jones, or son anymore, and eventually she starts sleeping around. The movie ends ambiguously with the former pilot taking matters into his own hands. The movie is rate R and short at an hour and 40 minutes long. Christophe Beck, from the Edge of Tomorrow and The Hangover OST did the soundtrack. It features this track by local band Black Mountain.
Alexander's Movie Reviews 