- Ethan Hawke in Good Kill
About a third of the way into Andrew Niccol’s Good Kill—currently playing at the Siskel Film Center and the Wilmette Theater—comes the saddest love scene I’ve seen in a movie in some time. An icily controlled camera pans across the bodies of Tommy Egan (Ethan Hawke), an Air Force pilot now operating fighter drones from a base outside Las Vegas, and his homemaker wife (January Jones) as they dutifully couple in their darkened bedroom. Their body language is eerily regimented, suggesting a piece of heavy machinery in operation. It’s an obvious metaphor for how Egan feels dehumanized in his new job, though no less provocative for being obvious. Little of the public debate surrounding the ethics of drone warfare has addressed how it impacts the pilots who carry it out. Good Kill argues that the experience of killing people from several thousand miles away could drive a person insane—the love scene in question signals Egan’s sense of detachment from his own body and subsequent mental deterioration.
