Eye in the Sky (PG). Director: Gavin Hood. Starring: Helen Mirren, Aaron Paul, Alan Rickman, Barkhad Abdi. 102 minutes
With more than 30 dead in Brussels just a few short months after the horrors in Paris, the Western world again confronts an assailant in ISIS who deals in fear and bloodshed.
In contemplating our responses to such attacks we recognise the historical and current geopolitical realities that have bred the ideologies that fuel them.
At the same time we balance the desire for revenge or the abstract need to shut down a diabolical foe at all costs, against the actual costs of violent retaliation — the inevitable loss of further innocent lives, and the opening of new wounds in which old ideological hatred might fester. Violence begets violence, and the ethics are inevitably messy.
This very messiness is the stuff of a new British film that coincidentally arrives in Australia this week. Eye in the Sky is set in a world of suicide bombings on the one hand, and drone warfare on the other. Its focus is far from Western Europe, on a small house in Nairobi, Kenya, where a group of known terrorists have, it is supposed by the American and British military personnel who surveil them, sought refuge in a safe house.
When it emerges that there are in fact plans for an imminent terrorist attack, the mission objective readily changes from capture to kill. But when a small girl wanders into the blast zone, suddenly the stakes become much thornier.
This turn of events sparks a series of human and political responses from the various players.
There's the young American drone pilot with his finger on the trigger (Paul) who won't pull it without knowing that all the checks and balances are in place to minimise the danger to the girl.
There's the pragmatic British officer running the mission (Mirren) who sees ethics and bureaucracy as stumbling blocks to the need to act now. Her superior (the late Rickman in one of his last performances) agrees, but has to deal face to face with politicians who are worried about the cases each scenario (to kill or not to kill) presents both for the public good and public perception.
There's also the Kenyan undercover agent (Abdi) on the ground in Nairobi who quietly goes about being the unspoken hero of the film, winging it at times to take matters into his own hands, at risk to his own