The Queen star plays an army colonel in her new drone drama Eye In The Sky, a part that was originally written for a male actor.
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Helen Mirren portrays Colonel Katherine Powell, who is in charge of a top secret drone operation in Kenya. The girl is acceptable collateral to destroy a greater evil. Do you kill the girl and the suicide bombers and save the 80 lives they might surely kill? It also helps that Gavin Hood, director of Tsotsi, proves himself an eager disciple of Hitchcockian tension. For Aaron Paul, that Ground Control Station is exactly the kind of container they use and we had him in that spot for twelve hours, just like a drone pilot.
One of the last films worked on by the late Alan Rickman will premiere in London tonight.
The moral complexity of drone warfare is without doubt one of our greatest generational dilemmas, and while Eye in the Sky doesn’t dwell on the politics or criticisms of drone strikes per se, its plot comes off as a little trite, being that its conflict is centred exclusively on the presence of a child. General Stanley McChrystal, US commander in Afghanistan, warned in 2013: “What scares me about drone strikes is how they are perceived around the world“.
On The Graham Norton Show, Helen said, “I think it’s a movie he would be very proud of in the sense that he would appreciate what the film was about and the way it tells its story”.
The problem with this film is it tries to ask some serious philosophical questions about the nature of modern warfare and the tough decisions generals and politicians have to make. “I think Gavin very astutely understood and realised putting a woman [in the role] just changed the discussion”. Less successfully, they try also to inject some intermittent humour (the Foreign Secretary must grapple with all this while suffering from diarrhoea, while the Secretary of State is playing table-tennis, on a visit to China). Eye in the Sky is, in effect, an extended meditation on the ethics of war. If so many people in so many corners of the defence establishment are habitually so concerned about the fate of every distant civilian then we are in safer hands than we feared.
Helen Mirren loves the fact that her Eye in the Sky character has opened up a debate about the difference between men and women’s decisions in the military.
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Eye in the Sky, takes the cliché and spins a vast, continent-spanning web of black comedy and political satire from it.
