Promising to do for drone jockeys what **American Sniper **did for, well, snipers, **Good Kill **sees Ethan Hawke play ex-US fighter pilot Tommy Egan who now pilots drones over ‘hostile’ skies from a portacabin somewhere in America. The film has a new poster which you peruse right here. “Don’t ask me if it’s a just war, that’s not up to us,” stresses Bruce Greenwood, his commanding officer, in the trailer (below). “To us, it’s just war.” Of course, the burden of all this long-distance killing, even via the impersonal prism of a video display, takes a heavy toll on Egan’s conscience. He tries to salve it with booze but soon butts up against his wife (January Jones) as his life spirals out of control. How badly wrong can things go for a man charged with launching Hellfire missiles for a living? And, obviously, for the people beneath them…
Andrew Niccol is the man behind this gritty-looking and timely character piece. It’s a welcome move away from sci-fi for the man who made his name with **Gattaca **and wrote The Truman Show but whose recent, heavily aestheticised work - In Time and The Host, in particular – has fallen a little flat.
Good Kill arrives in UK cinemas on April 10.