Years go by, decades end, cultures change, and yet no matter the place and time, human beings constantly dream up new, horrible ways to kill one another. In the late 1600s, Sweden gave us the howitzer. In 1836, Samuel Colt invented the revolver and ushered in the retirement of the sword. In 1952, the United States created the hydrogen bomb. Now, America is taking away its soldiers’ guns and replacing them with joysticks. Somehow, the image
of servicemen wielding keyboards instead of M4 carbines doesn’t strike as any less threatening; the squeeze of a trigger is deadly, but as Andrew Niccol’s Good Kill shows us, the push of a button is more so.
Niccol has been missing in action since debuting with the excellent Gattaca in 1997, which is to say that he hasn’t made a single film worthy of his initial promise in almost two decades. Instead, with the exception of the severely underrated Nicolas Cage vehicle Lord of War, he’s frittered away his talents on embarrassments like S1m0ne, In Time, and The Host. Good Kill isn’t quite Gattaca, but it’s also distinctly superior to everything else that lies between them.
The film also happens to be timely, or at least it happens to be the product of a very particular time in America’s history with foreign wars. That’s not to say the film lacks more timeless and universal elements, though. U.S. Air Force Major Thomas Egan (Ethan Hawke), Niccol’s ailing hero, exhibits many of the same symptoms audiences have seen in screen characters (whether fictional or based on real people) like Chris Kyle, William James, Sam Cahill, Ron Kovic, and John Rambo. But Egan is distinguished from these men by his weapon of choice, a computer station he occupies as he flies drones over Afghanistan. Seven thousand miles separate Egan from the violence; he’s comfortably entrenched in an air-conditioned trailer in las vegas, where he can destroy his targets with impunity (and whose suburban architecture Niccol very intentionally compares to Afghanistan’s own neglected, dusty infrastructure). But the distance doesn’t shield him from the psychological impact of drone combat, which is already in the process of taking its toll on him by the time the film begins.
We learn that Egan used to be a pilot back in the days when pilots were a necessity. Now he’s an IT nerd whose job involves remotely blowing people up. He’s also married, and his wife, Molly (January Jones), struggles to bridge the gap that divides her from her husband. Instead of treating her like a disposable background element, Niccol gives Jones a real role. She doesn’t nag; she suffers. Drones sound like such a smart idea on paper, but their benefits only extend so far to their operators. Even living at home with Molly and their children, Egan remains distant in all possible ways. His marriage’s deterioration is just as integral to Good Kill’s plot as its thorough critique of America’s love affair with unmanned aerial vehicles. Smartly, Niccol makes certain not to come down too thuddingly on the side of “against;” he explores every facet of using drones abroad, accepting that they do plenty of good for American troops while demonstrating objectively the ways in which they’re put to unscrupulous, horrific use. The title refers to Egan’s callback whenever he “prosecutes” a target—the film fondly dissects grotesquely antiseptic military terminology—but the only “kill” we see that possibly qualifies as “good” occurs at the very end.
By the nature of the material, Niccol must spend large amounts of time indoors staring at monitors with Hawke, who plays Egan as steely but rusting. The man is falling apart, and we can see it in just about every frame. Amazingly, Good Kill figures out how to make our passive complicity in Egan’s job feel dramatic. None of the cast members (including Zoë Kravitz, who plays Egan’s co-pilot in training) are ever in any meaningful danger, but Niccol exploits the very limited control they have over the consequences of their actions in ways that are surprisingly tense. Drone warfare’s advantages are few, its downsides substantial, and its shortcomings innumerable. The opposite can be said of Good Kill, which boasts a shocking vitality Niccol has been lacking for far too long.
