Good Kill

Andrew Niccol : 2014

Fighter pilot Major Tommy Egan has been flying F16s in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is still flying missions in South East Asia but he is now doing it from the inside of a very different cockpit – 7,000 miles away in the Nevada desert: he is now a drone pilot. This is not a story about the future of war, it is about the present. After fighting with the Taliban for eight hours he goes home to the suburbs to feud with his wife and kids. It's about the new schizophrenia of war. However, the pictures he sees are so graphic – as he says, "once you see it, how do you unsee it?" And he's started to disconnect from real life. There is a voyeuristic element to the missions, since a large part of the job is surveillance. He watches his target interact with his family, eating, sleeping, playing and then he receives the order to kill him. Egan's own family life is falling apart. Worse still, there is an escalation of the drone strikes. Double taps (where a target is struck and then a second strike hits the rescuers), strikes on funerals, "signature strikes" where anyone who fits the description of a terrorist is struck and of course, strikes in countries where no war has been declared. When Egan and his crew are told to start taking orders directly from the CIA – which selects its targets based not on personal profiles but patterns of activity – the notion of a "good" kill becomes even more abstract. A character study of a soldier's life in crisis, but also a cautionary tale with epic implications, raising urgent moral questions concerning the use of this new technology. Andrew Niccol's feature premiered in competition at Venice International Film Festival 2014.