Sal Frieland (Clive Owen) strolls down a city street, the anonymous faces in the crowds streaming past him instantly tagged with pop-up IDs. Frieland’s a cop in a future where every brain is connected to a central server, his hardwired Google Glass eyeballs giving him access not just to individuals’ data but everything they’ve seen and heard, all of it recorded for posterity and occasionally self-incrimination. Then, he’s called to a murder scene and finds the mind of the victim has been hacked––the culprit gone without leaving a digital footprint of any kind. Is this ghost in the machine a serial killer, an assassin, or something else?
Tag: Andrew Niccol
Film Review: ‘Good Kill’
What does war become in the remote-control age of drone strikes and remote surveillance? That’s what Andrew Niccol ostensibly asks in Good Kill—a film we know, after watching a few minutes, is going to spin its impersonal military-speak title into bitter irony. There we see Major Tommy Egan (Ethan Hawke) destroying military targets in Afghanistan from the Nevada desert, where he mans the deadliest videogame you ever saw.
This veteran Air Force fighter pilot has been downsized to drone jockey, and Tommy wants nothing more than to get back into the cockpit, even if it means going back to Afghanistan. Or maybe especially if it means going back. It’s not just the G-forces and the rush of speed. There’s something about deployment that makes war more real.