Good Kill (2015)

Thanks for the memories!

How sad is this?

Highly Overrated But Still Good

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

This movie looks like a sci fi movie, but it isn't. It looks like a Bourne franchise movie, but it is not that, either. This movie is what the war looks like today. No more US soldiers back in coffins covered by Star'n'stripes flag, they say. OK, folks, I have bad news. Drones can be driven by your enemies, too. Not only the Good Guys from Pentagon and CIA have drones, but Russian and Chinese, too. And these weapons can be bought and sold, just like nuclear weapons. War leads nowhere. It is just a lot of money in weapon Corporations pockets, in the US, just like here in Italy and everywhere. War to terrorism leads nations like US and Israel to be terrorist themselves. This is history not my opinion.This movie tries to show how human can be a drone based war. Maybe even worse PTSD effects. Alcoholic and psychotic disorders instead of physical injures. We can see Major Tom going down a spiral of madness through alcohol, impotence, seclusion and anger which raises its acme when he shoots the 7,000 miles away raper, like an almighty vigilante.It is not strange that this movie got mild average ratings (as Jarhead (2005)) Most people simply don't get it. They probably think like M.I.C. Joseph Zimmer (the one who talked about how green is Virginia to new women soldiers) they kill us, we kill them. No time for stopping and reflecting about military mistakes. It remember an interview a few decades ago, in which Buzz Aldrin (1930), the astronaut who was with Armstrong first mission on the Moon, said he wanted to nuke terrorists. This explains a lot about Trump victory and making US great again!

GOOD KILL is a worthy ethical drama masquerading as a military thriller. Ethan Hawke plays a drone operator who spends his days blowing up targets at the behest of the US government, but eventually the stress of the job takes its toll and he begins to crack. I found this long-winded story to be pretty depressing, if I'm honest; the subject matter is an interesting one but not so here. I found the whole thing, morals and all, done much better in EYE IN THE SKY. Hawke downplays it on autopilot, and only Zoe Kravitz shines as his friendly colleague. The marriage drama stuff is particularly gruelling and uninteresting. The worst thing about this? It's a film about ideas, methods, and feelings, but they forgot to put the humanity in.

The film is about a drone pilot played by Ethan Hawk who feels conflicted about killing people with drones , half a world away. It could have been an interesting film, allowing us a glimpse into a world we have heard about but have never seen. However, it devolves so blatantly into the Hollywood mantra of today "Women and kids are worthy, men don't matter"The subject matter regarding a person struggling with his ability to kill people at his fingertips is handled halfway decently, and we see Hawk and the other pilots worry about killing women and children several times. However, consistent with American culture today adult men are portrayed as expendable, all probably guilty of something. When they blow up a house or group, there is always supposedly good intelligence guiding the decision to kill them. Obviously serving as judge, jury and executioner for large groups is going to raise the possibility of error. Not only do they only seem to worry about the women and children, but they insert an awkward subplot in which a bad guy serially rapes a women, and then they kill him surgically . Of course, the female victim narrowly escapes injury or death, and as the smoke clears a small, innocent child runs into her arms, Ummmmmhummm....Since the bad guy was not an identified target it is a vigilant kill. However, there is no consideration of their accuracy in determining his guilt, and if it is mistaken identity- oh well...... a pilot conflicted by the killings can sleep well that night anyway. It seems contrived and simplistic, but consistent with a disturbing trend that violence is justified as long as it's against men, because we probably did something to deserve it.

Years ago I remember reading a book on medieval history where the invention of the crossbow and the accuracy that it gave archers made one critic cry 'the valor of man is at end'. In the words of Al Jolson he hadn't seen anything yet, most prominently nuclear bombs.Good Kill is a film that talks about the morality of using drones, but a lot of people seem to miss the point. Man is no longer part of the wonder of flight, that which made people like Charles Lindbergh cross the ocean, made air aces out of Eddie Rickenbacker and Baron Von Richtofen, made Chuck Yeager set speed records. Air war in movies when we entered the jet age was William Holden in The Bridges At Toko-Ri, Alan Ladd in The McConnell Story or even in Top Gun where Tom Cruise and his mates were training and matching their skills against each other.At one time Ethan Hawke was one of those Top Guns probably enlisted during the 90s and saw real combat with real people shooting back at him. Now he wages war from the suburbs of Las Vegas in a quonset hut type shack directing pilotless drones. His skills as a pilot no longer needed. If Tom Cruise's Pete Mitchell aka Maverick was still in the Navy he too might be facing such a challenge. You can just as easily launch a drone from the deck of the USS Nimitz.Hawke wants to get to flying again use the skills he's acquired. But in what could be the dawn of a new age he's become obsolete. War is about to become the province of video gamers and the violence rained down is real and coldly impersonal. Not even directed by the men trained to fight, but policy analysts of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia.Hawke's issues are putting a strain on his marriage to January Jones who understandably likes having her husband home every evening. I remember a film called Sabre Jet where it showed the Air Force in its first war in Korea flying missions in Korea during the day and heading home to the base in Japan. There the wives were worried that their men might not come back, here no such worry.Hawke also finds a kindred spirit in Zoe Kravitz who questions not just the morality of the whole idea but the fact that just as women are gaining equality in skill she's also not being needed.For humankind what will it all mean? I guess we'll all be going deep underground in the future as drones become more readily available. Were we meant to live that way?Good Kill is thought provoking picture about the future of something we hope doesn't have a future, war. Now is the time to bless those peacemakers.