Dave Cunningham
Dedicated to the memory of Alan Rickman, Eye in the Sky was the last live-action film to feature the actor, who passed away on January 14th, 2016. The British thriller film comes to Netflix today, December 13th, after premiering at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival in September 2015 and releasing in cinemas in 2016.
Eye in the Sky was produced by Ged Doherty, Colin Firth, and David Lancaster, and directed by Gavin Hood, the South African filmmaker known for Tsotsi and X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Written by British screenwriter and playwright Guy Hibbert, the award-winning film focuses on the ethics of drone strikes as it follows several groups of people trying to decide whether to launch a strike that they know will have serious collateral damage.
The targets of the drone strike are Al-Shabaab militants in Nairobi, Kenya, but the people deciding their fate, and the fate of the innocent civilians that will inevitably be caught in the blast, are watching from military bases and offices around the world. It is a sinister and tense thriller, with no easy way out for the people in charge of making decisions.
Eye in the Sky stars Dame Helen Mirren as Colonel Katherine Powell, Aaron Paul as American pilot Steve Watts, Alan Rickman as Lieutenant General Frank Benson, and Barkhad Abdi, known for Captain Phillips, as CIA counterterrorism agent Jama Farah. Also starring are Richard McCabe as Attorney-General George Matherson, Jeremy Northam as Brian Woodale, and Iain Glen as Foreign Secretary James Willett.
