“A Good Kill” Strikes Its Target

To ​“rifle” is to arm the weapon. To ​“lase” — or to laser it — is to lock in the aiming. When it hits in a cloud of flames, dirt, rubble, and body parts, it’s a ​“splash.” And if there are no innocent little kids with soccer balls or women sweeping rugs nearby, then it’s a ​“good kill.”

Unfortunately, most of the kills are not so ​“good,” but messy and full of innocents dying. That’s ​“collateral damage.”

You learn all that drone-speak pretty quickly in A Good Kill, the quietly terrifying cinematic window into what seems to be our current endless remote play-station warfare.

The film, directed by Andrew Niccol and starring Ethan Hawke, is flying at about 10,000 feet and able to see everything, at the Bow Tie Criterion Cinemas. (It runs here Thursday night.)

The film has a familiar plot, but it is dressed up in the new-to-us workaday world and wrenching moral travails of the drone pilots, and that’s what makes its 104 minutes riveting.

The familiar plot: Major Thomas Egan (Hawke) is a veteran pilot who served six tours in Afghanistan, consigned now to joystick killing in an Air Force Command trailer in Las Vegas. He yearns to get back into a real cockpit and make killing, well, more real, I guess.

His frustration is also moral, in all those innocents dying. His doubts and second thoughts intensify especially when the true villain of the movie, ​“seen” only by the voice of Langley, or the CIA, enters the film. The voice’s kill orders — with an echo to my ear of Hal, the runaway computer in Stanley Kubrick’s great 2001:A Space Odyssey — have a much lower standard of verifiability than he does.

Yet no one in the film, not even Egan’s wife Molly (January Jones), from whom Egan, due to his tensions on the job, grows estranged, points out that there’s plenty of collateral damage when a piloted F‑16 shoots missiles as well.

Sidelined because of his growing boozing and reluctance to pull the trigger, Egan finally, and against all orders, locks himself in the trailer.

There he ​“splashes” one, entirely on his own, on the head of a bad guy who, though no target of ours, has been seen by the all-seeing eye of the drone repeatedly and brutally beating and raping a woman in a dusty far-off Afghan courtyard.

This act of moral vigilantism enables Egan to get in his car and drive to Reno, where his wife has taken the kids because Egan’s remoteness and drinking have made him impossible to live with.

If we, as a country, are Egan — the moral heart of the film — then his offered redemption is not much solace, certainly not to us.

The film, which says it is based on actual events, is reminiscent of the 1949 film Twelve O’Clock High, about a World War II bomber squadron that Gregory Peck’s General Frank Savage has to whip into shape. In doing so, Savage, who must general and therefore cannot fly with his bomber crews over Germany, becomes catatonic, with all the tension he has absorbed waiting for news of how many planes are lost on each mission.

Hawke’s Egan is not the top officer, but the psychological effect of not being out there is the same. In one moment of opening up to his co-pilot Vera Suarez (Zoë Kravitz), he describes the thrill, the fear, and the challenge of landing his fighter plane on a carrier tossing thirty feet up and down on the sea. Afterward, about the current job, he says to her, ​“I feel like a coward. The worst that can happen to me is carpal tunnel.”

What really renders the film thought-provoking, despite cliches and too much exposition spouted by the characters, is the convincing visual world that Niccol, the writer and director of The Truman Show, has created here.

Just as he locked Jim Carrey’s Truman in a real-false world, so he does Egan in a schizophrenic Afghanistan-Las Vegas dualistic nightmare. We spend half the film locked inside the claustrophobic trailers on base with Egan, his more lefty-liberal colleague Suarez, his gung-ho, fast-talking superior Lt. Colonel Jack Johns, (Bruce Greenwood), and two other far more conventional trigger happy pilots. When Egan finishes his last redemptive shift and has splashed the rapist, the dank, metal door to the trailer is flung open, and he steps out in the sun-filled desert of Las Vegas. As he drives home, from one world to the next, the camera increasingly films him, or rather tracks him from high above, and we hear the click-click-click of far away bad guy fingers on a keyboard.

As Suarez has said, ​“one day the bad guys will be sending drones to get us. When they do, they’ll target a guy like Major Egan driving in the middle lane on the I‑15 Freeway in Las Vegas. If they get only him, and not a half dozen cars passing, or the houses in the neighborhood nearby, that’ll be their ​‘good kill.’”