Good Kill - film review

Good Kill gives a whole new, sinister meaning to the term "war games". In an air force base near Las Vegas, pilots without planes operate planes without pilots. A joystick is all they need to zap, bomb, exterminate enemies 7,000 miles away. From filmmaker Andrew Niccol - a specialist to date in war, science and humans acting like God (Gattaca, S1m0ne, Lord of War) - comes this topical, questioning chamber drama, intelligent if at times underpowered, about the American drone warfare programme.

Call it a compression chamber. The settings are largely confined, claustrophobically, to drone pilot Ethan Hawke's desert work station and his Vegas home with wife January Jones, quietly gnawed by his angst and secrecy. Yet it's the constricted budget of this independently made movie, we suspect, as much as its theme - the mental imploding of warriors who can never hazard real courage in a real war - that cramps and cabins the aesthetic and dramatic space.

The characters are too few. Some seem like walking labels. A rebellious cadet (Zoe Kravitz) keeps mouthing off against Uncle Sam's new air attack programme, prompting us to ask: "Why did Miss Outraged Innocence enlist in the first place?" Best in cast is Bruce Greenwood's straight-buttoned commanding officer with a penchant for drifting off message. Mind and job mandate momentarily askew, he will suddenly rail against the CIA taskmasters who press his men on to ever fresh horrors. ("Follow-up strike, please," commands the voice from Langley as the drone's feed-screen shows Afghans converging to help the latest rocket victim.) Then Greenwood resumes his best-of-all-possible-wars voice to reiterate the gung-ho verities of the American Way.

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