{"id":5510,"date":"2016-04-04T07:05:34","date_gmt":"2016-04-04T11:05:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5510"},"modified":"2016-04-25T06:23:05","modified_gmt":"2016-04-25T10:23:05","slug":"eye-in-the-sky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5510","title":{"rendered":"Eye in the Sky"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Alan

Alan Rickman in Eye in the Sky<\/p><\/div>\n

Exactly what a thriller should be, Eye in the Sky<\/em><\/a> has high stakes, conflicting motives, believable characters with a tangle of personalities, and a ticking clock. If you\u2019ve seen the trailer for this film<\/a>, you know that British and American military forces have put an \u201ceye in the sky\u201d\u2014an armed drone with a powerful camera\u2014to track members of a terrorist cell in Kenya, including an American citizen and two Brits. It finds them. The rest of the film is \u201cwhat next?\u201d<\/p>\n

When the terrorists are found to be preparing for more suicide bombings, what was intended to be a capture mission soon must be reevaluated\u2014legally, militarily, and politically.<\/p>\n

Director Gavin Hood assembled a terrific cast, with Helen Mirren as the U.K.\u2019s colonel in charge of the operation from an underground military bunker and Aaron Paul as the Nevada-based \u201cpilot\u201d of the drone. Alan Rickman<\/a> (so glad to see him, so unutterably sad he\u2019s gone) is a British lieutenant general supervising the mission from a wood-paneled conference room, along with high-ranking British government officials (reminiscent of the crowded situation room<\/a> when Osama bin Laden was killed). It\u2019s a room filled with more indecision than people.<\/p>\n

On the ground in Kenya is a British agent played by Academy Award nominee Barkhad Abdi, whose life if caught isn\u2019t worth the proverbial plugged nickel, the terrorists in a supposed safe house, the local Sharia law enforcement and security squads, and a neighboring family of innocents.<\/p>\n

Most of the movie concerns the deliberations of the groups in the bunker, in the conference room, and in the Nevada \u201cpilot house\u201d as they see what the cameras can tell them\u2014a lot, really\u2014about what is unfolding inside the safe house. They\u2019re aided by a facial recognition expert based in Hawai`i watching the same screens, attempting to verify the terrorists\u2019 identities. Because of the incredible detail of these images, the transitions from screens to street scenes (mostly from the point of view of Abdi) feel seamless.<\/p>\n

The key issues are \u201ccollateral damage\u201d\u2014 inevitable or unacceptable?\u2014and whether a nation can pursue its citizens across friendly countries\u2019 borders. Says Wired<\/em> reviewer K. M. McFarland<\/a>, \u201cit\u2019s the best movie yet to tackle the legal and moral quagmire surrounding modern technological warfare.\u201d That review also describes the degree of realism behind the movie\u2019s rather amazing drone technology.<\/p>\n

In the screenplay written by Guy Hibbert, the military and the political leaders views\u2019 on the situation differ irreconcilably. The U.K. military want to move; the politicians are cautious. Those views are flipped for the Americans. (Actor Laila Robins, seen locally on stage numerous times, plays a U.S. security official.)<\/p>\n

Filmed in South Africa in 2014, the staging of the safe house neighborhood carries a dusty realism that\u2019s a stark contrast to the diplomatic h.q. and the high-tech pilots\u2019 domain. Yet, the decision makers in those far-removed settings are not at all disengaged from the consequences on the ground. Alan Rickman\u2019s final words to a recalcitrant politician are: \u201cNever<\/em> tell a soldier he does not know the cost of war.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rotten Tomatoes<\/a> critics rating: 93%; audiences 88%.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Exactly what a thriller should be, Eye in the Sky has high stakes, conflicting motives, believable characters with a tangle of personalities, and a ticking clock. If you\u2019ve seen the trailer for this film, you know that British and American … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Eye in the Sky - exactly what a thriller should be! Helen Mirren, Alan Rickman, Barkhad Abdi--A+ cast","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[193,57,268,186,104,32],"tags":[395,337,129],"class_list":["post-5510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-espionage","category-movies","category-politics","category-technology","category-the-morgue","category-thriller","tag-alan-rickman","tag-helen-mirren","tag-wars-and-conflicts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1qS","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5510"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5510\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5512,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5510\/revisions\/5512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}