The missile met the newlyweds on the dancefloor. It killed dozens of their guests, but it was invited by only one: Aamir Barkawi, the father of the bride, who was targeted by an American UAV – an unmanned aerial vehicle (AKA a drone). Barkawi is a Pakistani arms dealer and a ruthless terrorist. He’s also the capital-B Baddie of London Has Fallen, the Gerard Butler action flick in which debate about the ethics of drone warfare is the first casualty.
Gung-ho, dumb and determinist, London Has Fallen rips its inspiration from the real world. In November 2008, a US airstrike on the Taliban in Wech Bagtu, in the southern province of Kandahar, killed 37 civilians at a wedding party, while 12 were killed by a UAV attack on the way to a ceremony in Yemen’s al-Baydah province in 2014.
In real life, drone warfare has prompted protests, legal action and revolt. Until now, films about drones haven’t properly engaged in the debate. They either forget there’s someone at the controls, emphasising the alien nature of a remote, robotic death, or, like London Has Fallen, use drones as just another weapon in the arsenal; a cool tool to make bigger, badder bangs.
At the end of the film, Barkawi, after an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate the US president, is killed in a second attack, shown in sexy slow motion as insurgents (and only insurgents) burn. This is drone warfare justice, served hot, stylish and bloody. The film’s philosophy is summed up by something Butler’s Secret Service agent says to a Middle Eastern thug just before he beats him to a pulp: “People like you have been trying to kill us for a long time. But 100 years from now, we’ll still be here.”
“Fuck London Has Fallen,” says director Gavin Hood, whose own drama about drones, Eye in the Sky, is out this week. “How can you put out such a piece of racist garbage and think it isn’t strategically detrimental to the fight against extremism?” he says. “It is a beautiful film for recruiting people to extremism. [The west] comes across as racist assholes. With all due respect to Gerard Butler, he should be ashamed of making it.”
Hood’s film, the first piece by Colin Firth and Ged Doherty’s Raindog production company, is one of the first drone movies to work in the grey areas that London Has Fallen obliterates. It recognises that everyone, from the commanding officers to the pilots and their targets has their own story to tell. Eye in the Sky’s objectives are a group of al-Shabaab extremists. Busy building bombs in a safehouse in Nairobi, Kenya, they are being watched by a drone crew commanded by a British colonel, Katherine Powell (Helen Mirren).
She has been tracking them for six years and wants, finally, to take her shot, but there’s a laundry list of checks and balances to get through first. A little girl is selling bread next to the safehouse – if they fire she’ll be caught in the blast. The suspects are British and American, so Powell needs clearance from the foreign secretary, who is more concerned with the impending PR disaster.
But Powell’s pilot (Aaron Paul) has a conscience: he wants the collateral damage report re-checked before he’ll put his finger to the trigger. Her only unwavering ally is Lieutenant General Frank Benson, a part that offers one last, arch on-screen role for Alan Rickman, who died in January.
Eye in the Sky maps out a moral conundrum , and Hood says his intention was to spark a debate around the ethics of drone warfare. The first real-world UAV attack (a bungled attempt at killing the Taliban’s supreme commander Mullah Mohammed Omar) was carried out by the CIA in Afghanistan in 2001. In the 15 years since, the on-screen representation of drones has shown only the extremes.
London Has Fallen is for the gear-heads. But some films have attempted to analyse the human cost of remote killing. Andrew Niccol’s Good Kill stars Ethan Hawke as Thomas Egan, a former air force ace who is redeployed as a drone pilot. He’s ordered instead to “prosecute” targets from the comfort of an air-conditioned trailer, thousands of miles from the conflict he is fighting. After many missions and many kills, Egan’s mental state deteriorates. He becomes self-destructive, drinking on the job and scaring his wife and kids into moving out.
It’s a little hysterical, but the drama does at least touch on an issue of real-world concern. Post-traumatic stress disorder in drone pilots is on the rise, with US Air Force staff experiencing emotional burnout at such a rate that the military is outsourcing work to private contractors. This topic is covered in detail by the upcoming documentary National Bird. Executive-produced by Wim Wenders and Errol Morris, the film follows three former drone operators as they reflect on their role in the deaths caused by the push of a button. It paints a bleak picture of modern warfare: a morally confusing world in which the regiment of the “kill chain” – the step-by-step procedure of an attack from targeting to arming to firing – is hard for low-ranked operators to buck.
One of National Bird’s subjects, an imagery analyst called Heather Linebaugh, had two friends who killed themselves after leaving the USAF. She has become a whistleblower on America’s drone programme, attacking politicians who promote the use of UAVs without understanding what the technology they endorse does to people on the battlefield.
Suspicious of video technology that, she says, barely allows an operator to tell if a suspect is carrying a rifle or a shovel, she questions the certainty with which many drone operators make life-or-death decisions. Watched with this in mind, Eye in the Sky presents the dream strike. Mirren’s character’s intel is augmented by an agent on the ground equipped with micro-drones (disguised as a hummingbird and a beetle). The agent is able to get gloriously clear images of the suspects, enabling positive identification within seconds.
Clive Stafford Smith, director of anti-capital punishment pressure group Reprieve, consulted on the film and is largely supportive of it. Most Hollywood projects that tackle real world ethics are “milquetoast”, he says. But he adds that the film’s take on intel wanders into the realms of improbability. “The technology they portray is bullshit,” he says. “They don’t have any of that high-resolution personal identification, which is one reason they [the US military] screw up so often.”
Yet, in encouraging the public to debate drone warfare, Eye in the Sky is unusual. Not since Jarhead, in which Jake Gyllenhaal played a Gulf war sniper constantly thwarted by protocol in his attempt to take his first shot, has so much thought gone into the firing of a weapon on-screen. Rarely do movies hold fire for very long. Film as a medium doesn’t normally allow for discussion of if and why someone should be killed.
Video games are, broadly, better at this. They aren’t passive, so they have the in-built abilty to ask the consumer to think about how they’re playing. Games also allow for pause without fear of losing the audience. The best of them ask their players to question what they are doing before they – literally, on modern game controllers – pull the trigger. Even if the choice is illusory (you normally have to kill to proceed, though there are games that tackle that conflict, too), at least it is offered.
The modern civilian is, in a sense, as close to warfare as we have ever been. Through whistleblowers such as WikiLeaks, we have never been more aware of how our wars are being fought, even if the gaps in our knowledge are still huge.
We can watch footage of drone strikes online, we can enact our own fictional operations in games. The UAV viewfinder has quickly become a familiar sight, even if most of us are very unlikely (and unwilling) to get our hands on the controls that place it on a target.
In an era of what academic Roger Stahl calls “Militainment”, warfare and pop culture feed each other. The Call of Duty video games have been used to market weaponry, while the US military endorses Hollywood blockbusters such as Transformers: Dark of the Moon because they speak to potential recruits. “This isn’t fucking PlayStation,” says a commanding officer in Good Kill. “You pull the trigger here, it’s for real.” That’s obviously true, but aesthetically at least, the worlds of war and leisure can sometimes seem pretty similar.
And there is also an appetite for the fantasy. The No 1 film at the UK box office at the beginning of last month? London Has Fallen, which flew into first place and has hovered around the top 10 since. This time two years ago, Captain America: Winter Soldier dominated the chart. In that film, Captain America, the original Avenger, faces off against a government body that wants drones to pre-emptively eliminate threats to national security.
Sibling directors Joe and Anthony Russo specifically cited drone strikes and Barack Obama’s “kill list” (a chart of suspected terrorists the US hopes to be target) as the themes that worried them and would reflect their audience’s anxieties.
Finally, Batman v Superman, Zack Snyder’s derided superhero mash-up, was talked up by the director as a serious statement on US foreign policy. In the film Superman is called “America’s drone”, albeit a sentient one who can question motive. And looks like Henry Cavill.
On-screen wars often offer resolution, but in real life, says Stafford Smith, they rarely fix anything. “If you ask people which wars of the 20th century were genuinely worth fighting, most of them would say, only the second world war,” he says. “We have a collective psychosis that war can solve problems. To that extent, movies can be dangerous. But I think what’s more dangerous is not having a conversation at all.”
Given that there are blockbusters such as Winter Soldier, that tackle the issue with a degree of thoughtfulness, to treat drones as a gimmick, a trick to shock and awe and the audience, seems like a cheap shot. As Hood says of the makers of London Has Fallen: “Their philosophy is obviously different to mine. I don’t know that they’ve actually thought it through that much. I think they have made a film that they think is cool. And that’s repugnant.”
Still, Eye in the Sky, for all its moral value, has also had to take the tropes for a spin. It’s difficult to get people into the cinema by pitching them a talkie about ethics. Some posters for the film feature a crosshair, a militant carrying a gun and in the background, an explosion. Even in films that take their time to engage, wherever there’s a drone, the fireball’s not far behind.
