If you’ve been watching the news or paying attention to our military’s ever-evolving technology, you might have noticed that wars are being fought in a very different way. Much like how companies like Amazon are trying to figure out ways to let drones deliver your packages right to your doorstep, the US Air Force is calling upon drone warfare to keep the lives of pilots safe by plopping them behind a screen. Even if a battle is being waged in the Middle East, a drone pilot can be located in Las Vegas, controlling the done like a real-life video game.
This is the next step for warfare – removing the emotional tragedy of war by reducing lives to blips on a monitor. It would have sounded like a piece of science fiction if Andrew Niccol has presented the topic some fifteen years ago, but as it stands today, Good Kill is an intriguing look into how the military landscape is evolving to accommodate the latest advances in dealing death. Our soldiers are safer than ever, but sometimes that doesn’t matter to the soldier themselves. In the case of Ethan Hawke’s character Tom Egan, we try to understand a man’s struggle to sit in a trailer when all he wants is to fly the free skies.
I had a chance to chat with Niccol and Hawke when they stopped off in New York City for the film’s press day. We spoke about what Good Kill means for the advancement of our military’s representation in cinema and they offered their perspectives on what drone warfare means to the military and how they strived to capture what it means to the soldiers/families themselves.
Check it out in the video above and enjoy!
