Eye In The Sky English Movie

Watch it if you're an Alan Rickman fan and do not wish to miss out on his last appearance on the big screen. But although the movie is tension filled war themed, there is so much cross talk about right and wrong and politics, that you want to snatch the controls from the hands of a weepy soldier and press the send button on the missile yourself. Mar 17, 2016 By Manisha Lakhe

Those used to watching Indian movies have seen politicians dither over decisions, show up to be spineless in the face of power held by goons and/or lobbies and so on and so forth. And you have seen the videos and photographs of the US President and his team watching the Marines take out Osama Bin Laden thousands of miles away in Pakistan.

Keeping these in mind, Eye In The Sky assumes you know how the drones work and it shows us how 'allies' are working to keep pockets of violent conflict in control by ensuring low ground level loss of soldiers.

There are a couple of unintentional moments of humor, but you as audience think of it only because the drama is still unfolding. Like Helen Mirren, unable to sleep because her husband is snoring, chooses to go to work and bomb the home where terrorists are planning attacks. And Alan Rickman is a tad irritated by his domestic task of buying a toy dumps it on a junior and goes into the room to bomb the terrorists.

The juxtaposition of the domestic scenes is meant to show us or even point out that the man who cannot even buy the right toy is given the job to take decisions whether to kill or let killings happen. But the audience is waiting to see what is going to happen. In the case of Helen Mirren showing up to work short of sleep is amusing.

The drama picks up because the Americans, operating the drones, are drama queens themselves. Soldiers who wear their emotions on their sleeves are not right to have on any team. It's like being under the scalpel of a surgeon who is afraid of blood. We understand that the dilemma facing the team is ethical: should they not bomb a house where terrorists are holed up because there's a little girl who will die for sure, or should they go ahead and bomb the house because it prevents greater damage and the cost is the life of just one little girl. What I hated watching are the tear-soaked faces of the drone pilot and the drone camera operator. How can you do your job if you have already decided that your job is unethical? And this is way before the little girl enters the vicinity of the bomb site. The director plays his emotional drone pilot card too early.

We end up being amused at the operation board room tactics where politicians have gathered. The director manages all stereotypes: one sweaty ditherer, one shrewish disagreeable politician, one legal chap who does not interpret but talks about 'rules', one army general to show that the army would have been stronger without the politicians interfering, and a couple of bodies who are sent out to make calls to 'higher up' authorities.

Helen Mirren is a Colonel in charge of the operations who does not much care about collateral damage but wants to bomb the place down once the identification of the dreaded terrorists is done. After a while into the dithering when you watch Helen Mirren irritated, you begin to think, if her decision making that seems to be 'bomb them now' stems from lack of sleep. She attempts to manipulate everything in order to get to her target, and somewhat restores our belief that the army is capable of tough decisions for the greater good. All that dithering and trying to do good and tears comes to a 'faceplam-like' conclusion, but then you saw that coming from a mile away, isn't it?