Eye in the Sky

Gavin Hood’s film happens not in one room but in rooms wired together: the command post at Northwood, the pilot flying the drone from Creech in Nevada, facial recognition at Pearl Harbor, an agent flying an insect camera in Nairobi, and the cabinet room in London. Responsibility moves along those lines. The decisive scene is not the launch but the writing of the collateral damage estimate. Colonel Powell asks her risk officer for parameters yielding a lower figure; he puts the probability between 45 and 65 percent, and Powell sends only the lower bound up the chain. The screenplay grew at BBC Films and was bought in 2011 for another director; when that fell through, Hood carried it forward. Colin Firth is among the producers. Filming was done in South Africa. The civil aviation authority refused permission to fly real drones, so the aircraft are visual effects. Beaufort West stood in for Nevada and the bombed square was built at Cape Town Film Studios. The four leads never met during the shoot; each worked with Hood alone. A good fit if you want tension that comes from signing authority rather than a weapon. Not for anyone approaching it as Alan Rickman’s farewell; this was his last live action role, and only his voice appears in his final film.