“Eye in the Sky” is the drone’s eye military thriller playing in limited release that some people may vaguely remember from advertisements that make it look about as compelling as watching people play Halo in YouTube “reviews.” I feel conflicted about this movie as there’s many things that work about it even if the overall whole is a little underwhelming.
What Works: The best thing going for “Eye” is showing the globalism of the War on Terror. The film’s central operation is to stop British-born, Somalian-assisted terrorists plotting an attack in Kenya with a Minneapolis-born, American-Somali as their suicide bomber. Trying to thwart this is a joint operation between Kenya, England, and the United States that has various players watching and waiting everywhere from Nevada (the drone pilot), Hawaii (a surveillance processing center), the nearby Kenyan military, the farther away British commanders, and an increasingly far-flung bureaucracy of trigger-reluctant British cabinet members. [It’s also a good way to emphasize the film’s great cast, including Alan Rickman in one of his final film roles.]
A sustained sequence where a Somali-intelligence asset is conveying images to his Commanding Officer, then a British general, then a British cabinet meeting, then they have to track down a British diplotmat in Singapore, the American Secretary of State in Beijing, and even higher level British politicians just to figure out the next move is masterful…
What Doesn’t: …Of course, “Eye in the Sky” does a clever job of mocking all the globalized layers for about an hour before the film threatens to become a parody of itself. The longer the thumb-twittling British politicians struggle to find excuses to be against launching a drone strike—-and the American pilot (Aaron Paul, who almost gets to play an unconflicted, mature character for once) struggles to keep from crying about his mission—-the more the suspense is diluted rather than increased. By the end of this agonizingly long decision it feels a bit anti-climactic, and—it must be said—overly sentimental. The film is twisting itself into knots with a weighty moral decision that the audience may not feel is really all that tough, and is almost certainly not something the real military Powers That Be would even hesitate to make.
What I Would Have Done Differently: The movie deserves a lot of credit for what it is and the plausible, realistic scenario it comes up with. But this is a case where stretching that out about twenty minutes too long (for a film that’s already really short) actually makes it a little farther fetched.