Don’t ask me if it’s a just war. It’s just war.

Good Kill

(2014)

Andrew Niccol’s latest might be viewed as presenting the flipside to the earnest and venerable combatant approach of Eastwood’s American Sniper. Unfortunately, while Good Kill has a clear moral and political point of view, in contrast to Eastwood’s contextual ambivalence, it is every bit as clumsy in its storytelling.

Niccol has a knack for picking provocative subject matter, but his ability to show restraint and finesse in exploring these ideas has generally been patchy. He comes up short in Gattaca (eugenics) Lord of War (the arms trade), S1m0ne (the monster media machine) and In Time (the haves and have nots). Good Kill knows all the arguments about drone warfare. It even has Colonel Johns (Bruce Greenwood, gluing the film together) rehearsing them in an entirely unsubtle manner at every opportunity (“Make no mistake about it, this ain’t Playstation. We are killing people”).

Co-pilot Suarez (Zoe Kravitz) inhabits the similarly obvious conscience role (the lily-livered liberal who even delivers the immortal “I didn’t sign up for this”) in response to her red-bloodedly patriotic colleagues Zimmer (Jake Abel) and Christie (Dylan Kenin). And then there’s becalmed Major Tom Egan (Ethan Hawke, making his third picture with Niccol), the on-the-surface rock but slowly-revealed burnt out. His moral fragmentation comes somewhere in the middle, as the ex “proper” pilot who just wants to get back in the cockpit of a fighter (“I don’t know what I am doing, but it’s not flying”).

Niccol makes some curious and ham-fisted choices. He’s keen to emphasise gradations of justification that don’t really fly (so to speak). At one end of the scale is CIA Langley (voiced by an unseen Peter Coyote), full of studied rhetoric but basically “collateral damaged be damned”. Anyone, anywhere in the Middle East may end up as an unfortunate casualty in the mission to eradicate the enemy. Women, children, funeral mourners, people gathered talking on a dusty road. At least the military has some standards in comparison, Niccol is saying. At least they (as in Colonel Johns) agonise over their actions and go home knowing their intentions were good (except those, like Zimmer and Christie who just want to kill anyone and everyone over there, lest they come over there and destroy everything America stands for).

On the far end is the actual “good kill”. At the climax, Egan, already demoted for purposefully fouling up a Langley mission, locks himself in the control centre and blows up the Afghan rapist who has been offending his and his fellow pilots’ sensibilities throughout (even Zimmer averts his eyes, so what this guy is doing really is bad). It’s a triumphant moment. Egan has done right. Killed someone who really deserved it. Has he? That seems to be the message. Niccol even has the cynicism to pull out a particularly queasy moment of tension where Egan might have accidentally killed the rape victim too. But no, she’s okay. Phew. It might have served the message of the movie better if she had died. Instead Niccol encourages false uplift in a conclusion that is shamelessly emotionally manipulative.

It also makes the picture, hardly a model of restraint in the first place, seem all the more jarring and obvious in retrospect. The varied jargon used to distance the perpetrator from unprovoked acts of aggression (pre-emptive self defence is a particularly deceitful item), and avoid confessing to what is actually being ordered, initially seems quite piercing but becomes much less so as the picture progresses.

Egan hits the bottle to like a dyed in the wool alcoholic but appears completely functional and quits with nary a withdrawal symptom. His home life dynamic (January Jones as his wife, in a big screen career that suggests her agent has something against her) is entirely clichéd, but it’s Hawke who is most problematic. He’s the stoic aviator-shades wearing seasoned serviceman, but he still carries the nervy air of his Todd Anderson from Dead Poets Society, only now slightly more desiccated.

Which isn’t to say the picture isn’t engaging. It is to be respected for being more economically told and more focussed than American Sniper. But it’s ultimately no more laudable. There is one aspect where Niccol wholly succeeds, and that’s the incongruity of the Vegas milieu from which these drone missions are fought. He convincingly portrays a life that is both repetitive and banal and psychologically and emotionally wearing. The pilots enter shipping crates in an expanse of sun-drenched tarmac for each shift, transported to a warzone thousands of miles away. They emerge into the calm of the Las Vegas desert, and then drive home to deceptively normal lives.

This dissonance is palpable, and much more resonant than any of the verbalised arguments for and against in carrying the idea and question of just what this is. Killing with impunity, from the safety of, and divorce from, the battlefield. This might be presented as merely the latest stage in an incremental shift that has been occurring ever since the invention of the bow and arrow but, the more removed and detached the capability becomes (and the more casually civilian fatalities are brushed off), the less easy it is to frame an argument that satisfies such methods (be it legal war or illegal “but justifiable” incursion).

Niccol laces occasional moments of effective humour through the picture (“I blew away six Taliban in Pakistan today and now I’m going home to barbecue”, Egan tells a cashier; “Why do wear flight suits?” he asks Johns, genuinely baffled; at one point Zimmer opines that the reason they aim to kill so many Afghanis is that the alternative of torturing them would cost too much), but one can’t help think the surreality of this environment would have been better served by the kind of outright irreverence shown by Gregor Jordan in Buffalo Soldiers. Either that, or stripped right down to a minimal level, allowing the absurd ambience to do the talking rather than characters’ overstated interactions. Good Kill frequently feels thin and didactic despite a surfeit of ripe material to explore.

You were this amazing occidental samurai.

Ricochet (1991) (SPOILERS) You have to wonder at Denzel Washington’s agent at this point in the actor’s career. He’d recently won his first Oscar for Glory , yet followed it with less-than-glorious heart-transplant ghost comedy Heart Condition (Bob Hoskins’ racist cop receives Washington’s dead lawyer’s ticker; a recipe for hijinks!) Not long after, he dipped his tentative toe in the action arena with this Joel Silver production; Denzel has made his share of action fare since, of course, most of it serviceable if unremarkable, but none of it comes near to delivering the schlocky excesses of Ricochet , a movie at once ingenious and risible in its plot permutations, performances and production profligacy.

He’ll regret it to his dying day, if ever he lives that long.

The Quiet Man (1952) (SPOILERS) The John Wayne & John Ford film for those who don’t like John Wayne & John Ford films? The Quiet Man takes its cues from Ford’s earlier How Green Was My Valley in terms of, well less Anglophile and Hibernophile and Cambrophile nostalgia respectively for past times, climes and heritage, as Wayne’s pugilist returns to his family seat and stirs up a hot bed of emotions, not least with Maureen O’Hara’s red-headed hothead. The result is a very likeable movie, for all its inculcated Oirishness and studied eccentricity.

No one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.

The Matrix (1999) (SPOILERS) Twenty years on, and the articles are on the defining nature of The Matrix are piling up, most of them touching on how its world has become a reality, or maybe always was one. At the time, its premise was engaging enough, but it was the sum total of the package that cast a spell – the bullet time, the fashions, the soundtrack, the comic book-as-live-action framing and styling – not to mention it being probably the first movie to embrace and reflect the burgeoning Internet ( Hackers doesn’t really count), and subsequently to really ride the crest of the DVD boom wave. And now? Now it’s still really, really good.

Well, something’s broke on your daddy’s spaceship.

Apollo 13 (1995) (SPOILERS) The NASA propaganda movie to end all NASA propaganda movies. Their original conception of the perilous Apollo 13 mission deserves due credit in itself; what better way to bolster waning interest in slightly naff perambulations around a TV studio than to manufacture a crisis event, one emphasising the absurd fragility of the alleged non-terrestrial excursions and the indomitable force that is “science” in achieving them? Apollo 13 the lunar mission was tailor made for Apollo 13 the movie version – make believe the make-believe – and who could have been better to lead this fantasy ride than Guantanamo Hanks at his all-American popularity peak?

Haven’t you ever heard of the healing power of laughter?

Batman (1989) (SPOILERS) There’s Jaws , there’s Star Wars , and then there’s Batman in terms of defining the modern blockbuster. Jaws ’ success was so profound, it changed the way movies were made and marketed. Batman’s marketing was so profound, it changed the way tentpoles would be perceived: as cash cows. Disney tried to reproduce the effect the following year with Dick Tracy , to markedly less enthusiastic response. None of this places Batman in the company of Jaws as a classic movie sold well, far from it. It just so happened to hit the spot. As Tim Burton put it, it was “ more of a cultural phenomenon than a great movie ”. It’s difficult to disagree with his verdict that the finished product (for that is what it is) is “ mainly boring ”. Now, of course, the Burton bat has been usurped by the Nolan incarnation (and soon the Snyder). They have some things in common. Both take the character seriously and favour a sombre tone, which was much more of shock to the

You think a monkey knows he’s sitting on top of a rocket that might explode?

The Right Stuff (1983) (SPOILERS) While it certainly more than fulfils the function of a NASA-propaganda picture – as in, it affirms the legitimacy of their activities – The Right Stuff escapes the designation of rote testament reserved for Ron Howard’s later Apollo 13 . Partly because it has such a distinctive personality and attitude. Partly too because of the way it has found its through line, which isn’t so much the “wow” of the Space Race and those picked to be a part of it as it is the personification of that titular quality in someone who wasn’t even in the Mercury programme: Chuck Yaeger (Sam Shephard). I was captivated by The Right Stuff when I first saw it, and even now, with the benefit of knowing-NASA-better – not that the movie is exactly extolling its virtues from the rooftops anyway – I consider it something of a masterpiece, an interrogation of legends that both builds them and tears them down. The latter aspect doubtless not NASA approved.

Drank the red. Good for you.

Morbius (2022) (SPOILERS) Generic isn’t necessarily a slur. Not if, by implication, it’s suggestive of the kind of movie made twenty years ago, when the alternative is the kind of super-woke content Disney currently prioritises. Unfortunately, after a reasonable first hour, Morbius descends so resignedly into such unmoderated formula that you’re left with a too-clear image of Sony’s Spider-Verse when it lacks a larger-than-life performer (Tom Hardy, for example) at the centre of any given vehicle.

He doesn’t want to lead you. He just wants you to follow.

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (2022) (SPOILERS) The general failing of the prequel concept is a fairly self-evident one; it’s spurred by the desire to cash in, rather than to tell a story. This is why so few prequels, in any form, are worth the viewer/reader/listener’s time, in and of themselves. At best, they tend to be something of a well-rehearsed fait accompli. In the movie medium, even when there is material that withstands closer inspection (the Star Wars prequels; The Hobbit , if you like), the execution ends up botched. With Fantastic Beasts , there was never a whiff of such lofty purpose, and each subsequent sequel to the first prequel has succeeded only in drawing attention to its prosaic function: keeping franchise flag flying, even at half-mast. Hence Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore , belatedly arriving after twice the envisaged gap between instalments and course-correcting none of the problems present in The Crimes of Grindelwald .

So, you’re telling me that NASA is going to kill the President of the United States with an earthquake?

Conspiracy Theory (1997) (SPOILERS) Mel Gibson’s official rehabilitation occurred with the announcement of 2016’s Oscar nominations, when Hacksaw Ridge garnered six nods, including Mel as director. Obviously, many refuse to be persuaded that there’s any legitimate atonement for the things someone says. They probably weren’t even convinced by Mel’s appearance in Daddy’s Home 2 , an act of abject obeisance if ever there was one. In other circles, though, Gibbo, or Mad Mel, is venerated as a saviour unsullied by the depraved Hollywood machine, one of the brave few who would not allow them to take his freedom. Or at least, his values. Of course, that’s frequently based on alleged comments he made, ones it’s highly likely he didn’t. But doesn’t that rather appeal to the premise of his 23-year-old star vehicle Conspiracy Theory , in which “ A good conspiracy theory is an unproveable one ”?

You’d be surprised how many intersectional planes of untethered consciousness exist.

Moon Knight (2022) (SPOILERS) Now, this is an interesting one. Not because it’s very good – Phase IV MCU? Hah! – but because it presents its angle on the “superhero” ethos in an almost entirely unexpurgated, unsoftened way. Here is a character explicitly formed through the procedures utilised by trauma-based mind control, who has developed alters – of which he has been, and some of which he remains, unaware – and undergone training/employment in the military and private mercenary sectors (common for MKUltra candidates, per Dave McGowan’s Programmed to Kill ). And then, he’s possessed by what he believes to be a god in order to carry out acts of extreme violence. So just the sort of thing that’s good, family, DisneyPlus+ viewing.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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