(credit: Bleecker Street)

While there have been no shortage of lackluster dramas featuring drones, there has yet to be a definitive Saving Private Ryan or Apocalypse Now-type war epic that really brings drama and pathos to drone warfare. Eye in the Sky, opening March 11 in the US, aims to be that movie. And it does a remarkably good job, not only of building tension around the act of firing a missile from a drone, but also of making the bureaucratic arguments behind the drone strike seem as interesting as the action.

Part of the horror of drone warfare is that the drama is one-sided—only the victim has a full story to tell. The drone is emotionless. Even for the drone operator, killing becomes the cold-blooded entry of GPS coordinates, a joystick maneuver, the calm pull of a trigger in a quiet room. If pathos exists within this narrative, it merely runs in parallel to the calculating and detached drone operations.

But with Eye in the Sky, director Gavin Hood tries to capture some of the human emotion that goes on between the command to fire a missile and the pull of the trigger. The plot goes like this: Helen Mirren plays Colonel Katherine Powell, a British military officer who’s been following a number of targets, including a British woman who has been working with Somalian terrorist group al-Shabaab in Kenya. When Powell gets word that a number of her targets, including the British woman, will be meeting at the same house, she asks for assistance from the US military for the capture mission.