Ethan Hawke delivers a haggard, grimly convincing portrayal of a modern soldier-cum-video-game-player in “Good Kill,” Andrew Niccol’s timely meditation on the mental and emotional costs of remote-control warfare.
Once a pilot, now trapped behind a joystick for hours on end in the dusty deserts of Nevada, Hawke’s Maj. Thomas Egan executes drone strikes against the Taliban — or, increasingly, people who look and act like they might be Taliban — in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Tom, who once flew F-16s, longs to be back in the air,. His sense of dislocation makes life difficult with his wife, Molly (January Jones), a former dancer. Meanwhile, when his orders start coming from the disembodied voice of a CIA leader (who else but Peter Coyote), the already slippery ethical slope of his mission becomes downright vertiginous.
“Good Kill” was written and directed by Niccol, who has addressed issues of how technological change affects human values in such speculative films as “Gattaca” and “The Truman Show,” which he wrote. With “Good Kill,” he embraces realism more fully, grounding his characters — literally and figuratively — in the monotony, dislocation and “Top Gun”-inspired jargon of their weirdly isolated camaraderie.
Bruce Greenwood and Zoë Kravitz round out an excellent cast as the film reveals an aspect of contemporary warfare that the public is often happy to ignore: that while drone strikes may possess the advantages of less collateral damage and material destruction, they involve judgment calls and subjective opinions that skate a thin line between the rules of engagement and cold-blooded assassination.
