The technology of martial arts in the West has long aimed to increase the distance between attacker and target — from arrows to bullets to gravity bombs. Today, foes can be vanquished from half a world away — with the press of a button.
Such is the case for Air Force Maj. Thomas Egan, the main character of the film “Good Kill,” which opens Friday. From the safety of a military base outside of Las Vegas, Maj. Egan, a fighter pilot, delivers drone strikes on the other side of the planet.
“It’s a new type of solider we have not seen before that’s going to war ’at home,’” said Andrew Niccol, the writer and director of “Good Kill.”
Mr. Niccol was interested in examining what long-distance warfare does to the psyche of its practitioners, especially eager pilots like Maj. Egan who must be content operating what amounts to a high-stakes video game.
“What kind of toll does it have on a soldier who is fighting the Taliban for 12 hours by remote control and [then] go pick up his kids from soccer?” said Mr. Niccol, a New Zealand native. “This is the first generation of this type of solider.”
As portrayed by Ethan Hawke, Maj. Egan misses the action of a cockpit and feels guilt in destroying faceless enemies who do not even comprehend they are about to be annihilated.
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“It’s not the war on terror that bothers him, it’s the fact that he’s not engaging in the war,” Mr. Hawke said. “He’s not in danger himself.”
Mr. Hawke said the ethos of the modern warrior has been turned upside down, requiring someone like his character to risk little while inflicting maximum damage on the enemy without ever seeing the battlefield.
“Normally [when] you risk your own [life], you have the courage of your own convictions,” Mr. Hawke said, “so there’s huge self-respect there” that is missing in the world of the remote-control drone pilot.
“We have always tried to distance ourselves from the enemy,” Mr. Niccol said, adding that he believes a drone is the “ultimate sniper” weapon. He points out that a recent real-life attempt by the armed forces to reward soldiers for their virtuosity with drones led to backlash from those who serve in the field.
“There was such an outcry from other branches of the military saying, ’No, c’mon, medals are for acts of valor and courage,’” he said.
In the fictional realm of “Good Kill,” Maj. Egan and his colleagues engineer drone strikes from inside a trailer at their Nevada base at the behest of the disembodied voice of a CIA operator (Peter Coyote), who directs their actions via phone from headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Maj. Egan’s team watches enemies from miles away before pulling the trigger — producing terrific explosions when the ordnance reaches its destination.
Mr. Niccol said that Maj. Egan, being a pilot, would rather fly into the danger zone to unleash his payload himself. “But now you drop your munitions and sit and watch [a monitor] And that’s a game. You’re watching in high-def whom you’ve just blown apart,” he said.
“Good Kill” traces the psychological devastation that video game warfare wreaks upon Maj. Egan, particularly in the family life he leads with wife Molly, portrayed by “Mad Men”’s January Jones.
“It’s a complicated Catch-22 for how rattled he’s feeling by not being in danger,” Mr. Hawke said of his character.
Perhaps that is why Maj. Egan forms a special bond with a team of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, for whom the drone operators act as a sort of angelic presence as the ground troops engage with enemy forces. Mr. Hawke points to an especially poignant scene in which Maj. Egan “watches” the platoon sleep via the drone’s cameras.
“He feels connected to them,” he said. “He’s actually doing something good he can feel, as opposed to everything else [to which] he has no connection.”
Mr. Hawke and Mr. Niccol first worked together on the 1997 sci-fi drama “Gattaca,” which described a not-too-distant future where parents can genetically engineer their children. Mr. Hawke starred as Vincent, a “God child” conceived the old-fashioned way, who must fool his dystopian society into believing he is a member of the new human race in order to join a space mission.
Mr. Niccol sees a connection between his earlier collaboration with Mr. Hawke and their new film.
“There are real parallels between the drone program and genetic engineering,” Mr. Niccol said, “because genetic engineering can be so beneficial [for] curing things, and yet it can also be a ticket to a different place. In [“Good Kill”] it’s the most precise weapon we have, and yet we can also really precisely kill wrong people. It’s just a new technology, and [much depends on] how responsible we are with it.”
Despite strong support from critics, “Gattaca” did only modest business, which Mr. Hawke credits to poor marketing.
“That’s out of our control,” Mr. Niccol added. “I just make ’em, somebody else sells ’em.”
Mr. Niccol also wrote the screenplay for “The Truman Show,” which starred Jim Carrey as a man who doesn’t realize he is the focus of a TV show. Made in 1998, the film was released long before the term “reality television” had been coined. Like “Gattaca” and “Good Kill,” “The Truman Show” dealt with duality; however, Truman was woefully unaware of the double nature of his own existence.
“I’m a Gemini,” Mr. Niccol said and laughed when queried about the recurring theme in his work. “I don’t like to analyze what I do, because I’m scared when I do it.”
Mr. Hawke also appeared in Mr. Niccol’s film “Lord of War” in 1995. In the decade since, Mr. Hawke has appeared in nearly 20 films and recently became a director in his own right with his documentary “Seymour: An Introduction,” which tells the story of Seymour Bernstein, an 88-year-old New York piano teacher who ceased performing in the 1970s — and whom Mr. Hawke was able to coax into giving a new recital.
“Andrew has a closet full of scripts, all of which need to be made,” Mr. Hawke said of Mr. Niccol. “As a friend of his, I’ve gotten to read a bunch of them.”
Asked what future stories might be in said closet, Mr. Niccol clammed up, citing his own superstitions.
“If I said I want to make this, I think it would jinx it,” he said.
With the topic of future films on the table, Mr. Hawke weighed in on if there will be a fourth “Before” film featuring himself and Julie Delpy returning as Jesse and Celine, the American and Frenchwoman who met on a train in Vienna in 1995’s “Before Sunrise,” reunited in Paris in 2004’s “Before Sunset” and were last seen in 2013’s “Before Midnight,” now a middle-aged couple with twins enduring a heated evening on a Greek island that could end their marriage.
Mr. Hawke and Miss Delpy co-wrote the latter two films with Richard Linklater, who directed all three.
“There’s something to me about those three films that work in totality,” Mr. Hawke said, equivocating on future episodes in the life of Jesse and Celine. He recalled that “Before Sunrise” begins with a couple in their 40s arguing on the train and witnessed by Jesse and Celine — who have, in essence, become that very couple by the end of “Before Midnight.”
“There’s something about the end of the third one … that seems to me finished about it.” With a smile Mr. Hawke adds, “But that’s not to say, you know, if I’m broke enough …”
• Eric Althoff can be reached at twt@washingtontimes.com.
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