I plan
to see GOOD KILL, but the director does not understand the immorality and
unconstitutionality of killer drone strikes.
By CHRISTOPHER LAWRENCE
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL
Air
Force pilot Tom Egan (Ethan Hawke) walks into a Las Vegas liquor store, and the
clerk, sizing up Egan’s flight suit, asks if he’s ever flown in a war.
“Blew
away six Taliban in Afghanistan just today,” Egan informs him. “Now I’m going
home to barbecue.”
Set in
2010, “Good Kill” offers a blistering look at the escalating horrors of drone
warfare and the toll it takes on those waging it — ostensibly from Creech Air Force Base,
about 45 miles north of Las Vegas in Indian Springs. The word “Creech,” though,
is never used.
“Even
though the strikes (in the movie) themselves are well-documented, I can’t say
for sure they were flown out of Creech or out of Holloman (Air Force Base in
New Mexico) or one of the other bases,” writer-director Andrew Niccol says.
“So, just out of respect, I didn’t want to say that this definitely occurred
out of Creech, because I don’t know that.”
Opening
at Tropicana Cinemas on Friday, the day it becomes available on a variety of
digital platforms, “Good Kill” starts as a sly, sardonic look at the new face
of warfare.
“Best
use of 68,000 taxpayer dollars I’ve seen all day,” Spc. Zimmer (Jake Abel)
crows after a successful missile strike. “Good luck figuring out which bits go
in what casket,” he adds after six insurgents are all but vaporized. At one
point, he sings Eddie Money’s “Two Tickets to Paradise” after a second missile
hits its target.
Airman
Suarez (Zoe Kravitz), a newcomer to Egan’s four-member crew, sums up the
oddities of waging war in the Middle East from an air-conditioned trailer in
Nevada with a dry, “Battlefields and blackjack — every girl’s fantasy.”
To
portray the blackjack part of the equation, Niccol (“Gattaca,” “Lord of War”)
and his crew spent “only about a week” in Las Vegas before filming the bulk of
“Good Kill” in Albuquerque thanks to New Mexico’s more generous tax credits.
But
with the exception of one “downtown” scene that clearly wasn’t filmed here,
despite the presence of the Stratosphere in the background, it’s hard to tell
where Las Vegas ends and Albuquerque begins.
The
only other part of Las Vegas in “Good Kill” that doesn’t ring true: Egan commutes
to and from work via the length of the Strip.
“Yeah,
geographically I took some license there,” Niccol admits, but he had a good
reason. “Because it’s become such a global phenomenon, the drone program, to
have those symbols along the Strip of other countries seemed just so perfect.
So I definitely wanted to use that.”
As
“Good Kill” progresses, Egan’s crew and its commanding officer, Lt. Col. Johns
(Bruce Greenwood), fall under the command of the CIA, portrayed by a voice
(supplied by Peter Coyote) known only as Langley on an intercom. Soon, they’re
no longer blowing up armed insurgents, they’re being ordered to launch strikes
that will purposely also kill women and children. The commands become
increasingly egregious, including obliterating first responders and funerals.
Egan
and his co-pilot, Suarez, carry out some of the missions with tears in their
eyes, and Suarez openly wonders whether they’re committing war crimes.
“All
the drone strikes you see have occurred,” Niccol attests. “I didn’t make any of
those up. I didn’t exaggerate any of those.
“I
modeled all the drone strikes on WikiLeaks, because that’s the only way that
the drone strikes are disseminated. I like to say that (Afghan War logs leaker)
Chelsea Manning almost deserves a research assistant’s credit.”
Egan,
who flew six tours of duty and is desperate to get back into a real cockpit, is
haunted by having seen the faces of those he’s killing, not to mention his
having to stick around and use the drone’s camera to count the bodies.
There’s
an intimacy to his new role that he’d never faced, which leads to his keeping a
bottle of vodka under the bathroom sink and, eventually, in his free hand while
he’s behind the wheel of his 1967 Firebird. The damage it inflicts on him, as
well as his relationship with his wife (January Jones of “Mad Men”), is
devastating.
The
emotions feel as raw and real as the strikes themselves.
“I
used ex-drone pilots to authenticate everything,” Niccol says. “And I had two
of them on set the whole time, just to make sure that the language was right
and how they were operating the drone was correct. And it’s not difficult to
find them, because there’s a lot of burnout amongst drone pilots.”
Unlike
“American Sniper,” which some moviegoers vehemently argued took a pro-war
stance while others felt just as strongly that it was anti-war, Niccol confirms
he hasn’t heard from anyone who had a positive view of drone warfare after
seeing “Good Kill.”
“One
of the interesting things about the film is that some people say it’s
anti-American,” the New Zealand-born filmmaker says, “and in Europe they say
it’s too pro-American.”
But,
Niccol concludes, there’s really no point in opposing the use of military
drones.
“To be
anti-drone is like saying you’re anti the Internet. The drone program is not
going anywhere. It’s here to stay … and that’s going to be the new normal for
war. We’re going to have more and more remote war. It’s just a new tool. You
can’t be against it, you just have to weigh whether or not it’s being used
responsibly.”
Copyright ©GateHouse Media,
Inc. 2015. All rights reserved
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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