Good Kill (Movie about Drones warfare)

[Musafir117]

Disregarding Mafia films and Tim Burton's Mars Attacks!, Good Kill is almost certainly the first war movie set in Las Vegas. The weapons of battle here aren't swords or machine guns but the computer controllers used by military personnel in the steel containers ("sweatboxes") from which they operate "drones". Their targets are thousands of miles away in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Yemen. They see their enemies appear on screen like pixelated figures in a game of Call of Duty, line up their sights and press the button; then, eight to 10 seconds later, comes the "splash".
Traditional Hollywood war movies had square-jawed heroes such as Gary Cooper or John Wayne in the heat of battle. Even Kathryn Bigelow's Oscar-winner The Hurt Locker (2008) featured bomb-disposal experts on the frontline. Here, the US military protagonists are a "bunch of gamers", sitting in front of screens in what appear to be shipping containers in the Nevada Desert.
"I blew away six Taliban and now I am going home to barbecue," says Major Thomas Egan (Ethan Hawke), summing up a typical day in the life of a soldier fighting the war on terror using the new technology. He lives in the suburbs with his family and leads what appears to be a boring, routine existence – with the proviso that his job requires him to blow up people.