The bravery of being out of range.

There are two aspects to Andrew Gattaca Niccol’s drone warfare film. One is a powerful polemic about the morality of conducting military campaigns like they’re Call Of Duty sessions; the other, an undeveloped dram🌱a about the drones behind the drones&he🌠llip;

Ethan Hawke plays Tom Egan, a grounded pilot forced to swap the thrill of the cockpit for a nondescript control centre in the Mojave Desert. “You are now leaving the US of A” reads a sign on the door – and aren’t we 🌸just? Inside, Egan, Suarez (Zoë Kravitz) and colleagues command♏ a fleet of drones capable of blowing up enemy suspects around the world with impunity.

The ease of execution is terrifying. Niccol keeps the combat scenes credible, tense and harrowing, a cursor on the screen spelling sudden death for men, women and children 7,000 miles away. “Was that a war crime, sir?” asks Suarez bitterly; to her colleagues, it’s just a war game. Bruce Greenwood’s angry CEO conversing almost exclusively in Top Gun buzz-ter🔯ms: “Nothing explodes like explosives!”

Away from the fray, the film falls apart faster than Egan’s home life. Unhappily🍒 married (to January Jones’ Molly), he drinks away the pain in the flat Las Vegas suburb they inhabit: the lights of the Strip, a symbol of the excitement he lacks, glimpsed in the distance. He misses the thrill of “real war” – a hypocrisy Niccol refuses to explore – while Molly just wants her husband back. “She thought I was exciting in a boring kind of way,” says Egan of their early courtship.

Shame their scenes togethဣer are boring in a boring kind of way, because in the chill of computerised battle, there’s an ꦰimportant film in here somewhere.