Review of Good Kill (2015) by Maksim B — 19 Nov 2015

Far more psychological drama and character study than a war thriller, Good Kill is a thought-provoking, uneasy and gut-wrenching movie which describes the modern warfare of nowadays and asks legitimate and hard-to-answer moral questions.

Thomas Egan (Ethan Hawke) is a grounded F16 pilot who is leading drone missions and is selected to lead special ops for the CIA. Facing life on the ground and spending hours looking at a monitor, locked in a container, Egan received tasks which are controversial to say at least. A detailed character study of the people involved in drone wars, the desensualization of the team and the realities which they face in the containers come as a huge blow to the innocent and uninformed audience. The combination of director Andrew Nicol and Ethan Hawke is so realistic that every time he zeroes a target and fires the weapons of the drone the result on the monitors is brutally and disturbingly authentic. The movie could have been even much better if Ethan Hawke's character family problems were further explored, but on the other hand this would have decreased the effect of spending so much time locked in the container together with him.

Good Kill is definitely a movie to be seen, but not by people searching for a mainstream entertainment. Provoking, hard-to-chew and demanding, this is hard to watch, but excellent movie.