BEFORE: Helen Mirren carries over again from "The Leisure Seeker", and I was wrong the other day, it's not four Helen Mirren films that I scheduled, it's really five. A Mirren-thon, if you will. I'm not sure why I thought it was four, was I mentally not counting "The Good Liar" because it was on a screener? That can't be, I guess it was just a simple mistake or a brain lapse. Anyway, the films of Helen Mirren are going to get me very close to Movie #3,500 - and a big century milestone is usually a big deal around here, only I'm not really in the mood for celebrating that much these days. Taking any pleasure at all in things feels very inappropriate when there's a pandemic going on, and people are dying in hospitals not that far away. Anyway, people are being publicly shamed for having too good a time these days, so we're all supposed to pursue more noble pursuits, I guess, or set aside time each day for quiet reflection or something, when truth be told, it feels more like a time for panic and anxiety. I'd run screaming through the streets if I could, truth be told, only that doesn't accomplish anything in the long run, and it puts me at greater risk. So that's out of the question.
When I was 17 the Chernobyl disaster occured in the Ukraine, April of 1986. I would have been a freshman at NYU at the time, and sometime later, maybe a few months after, I was visiting my parents in Massachusetts and they were telling me that their local parish was hosting some people from the Chernobyl area, so they could get away from the residual radiation. But it was only for a few weeks, and after that, those people would return to the Ukraine. I thought this was madness of a sort, why would they want to go back to the disaster area, why not keep them in the U.S., where they could make a fresh start? Isn't the half-life of radioactive material a few thousand years, there's no way that area could still be safe, who in their right mind would want to return to an irradiated area? Things were simpler in my mind as a teenager, I guess, because whatever else, I guess that was their home. Since then I've made my own home in New York City, and I've stayed here through a terrorist attack, a blackout, a superstorm and a couple of snowpocalypses, and now this pandemic. People around the country might be looking at my situation right now, sheltered in place near the epicenter of an outbreak and wonder, who in their right mind would stay in that disaster area? And I realize now the Chernobyl situation might have been as complicated as my own. Running right now would be both useless, ill-advised and a form of giving up, and I don't want to give up on my home or my city. So I'm here for the duration, whatever that means or however long that takes, unless things get really ultra super-bad. And I don't even want to think about what that would be like.
THE PLOT: Col. Katherine Powell, a military officer in command of an operation to capture terrorists in Kenya, sees her mission escalate when a girl enters the kill zone, triggering an international dispute over the implications of modern warfare.
AFTER: This film was probably intended to spark some kind of ethical debate about the use of drone technology in warfare, only it feels like it falls a little short, perhaps. I kind of expected a questioning of drone tech itself, like whether it's fair to sit in a room hundreds or thousands of miles away, and use computers, cameras and lasers to direct a missile strike with pinpoint accuracy, taking out a combatant who might never even know he was a target. Instead, the debate here concerns collateral damage, any innocent bystanders in the area who wouldn't realize that they're living next to or even passing by the house of a suspected terrorist, and they'd obviously be taken out by a drone strike from afar. In this specific case, it's a small girl who is selling bread right outside the house where a couple of terrorists are meeting with a former British national who seems to have turned to the other side. With a missile strike, the U.S. and British combined forces could take three people off their most wanted list, but if there's a chance that they injure or kill this little girl, is the strike warranted?
The short answer is yes, if they can get the chances of the girl not surviving the attack down below 50%, at least on paper. The damage and the fallout is speculative, of course, and nobody really knows for sure how big the blast radius will be, or even in the end, if it's OK to take out one innocent person to save the lives of many people. If the allied forces do nothing, then there's a chance that three people in the house will put on suicide vests and attack a shopping mall, where they could kill 80 to 100 people. So therein lies the ethical debate, can you kill one person to save 100 more?
But I don't know, there's only so much drama that you can wring out of a film full of watching people as they themselves watch screens, whether that's drone footage or video-chatting with each other. It's a bit like the problem they're having with the late night talk shows right now, where they can't host a studio audience, so they're all broadcasting from the hosts' super-nice apartments or mansions, using iPhones for cameras and teleconferencing in the sidekick or the musical director. I wonder if the networks were just contractually obligated to put on a show, because they're paying the union people who aren't working and they have to keep the advertising dollars coming in somehow, but the shows themselves are darn-near unwatchable. I hate to be selfish, but I need this pandemic to end soon because I can't stomach all the bad phone-camera work being seen on the news, both the footage they're airing from the front lines, and also the non-studio newscasters with no make-up and all the shaking of the cameras! Makes me sick to my stomach. Nobody looks good on a video-chat, simply nobody, so really I think they should just run repeats for the duration of the crisis, that should be enough motivation to get everyone focused on staying indoors and staying healthy - you don't get any new TV shows until the pandemic is over! Then you'll see people volunteering left and right and putting more pressure on scientists to develop a vaccine in record time.
Also starring Alan Rickman (last heard in "Alice Through the Looking Glass"), Jeremy Northam (last seen in "Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story"), Iain Glen (last seen in "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider"), Monica Dolan (last seen in "Kick-Ass 2"), Richard McCabe (last seen in "1917"), John Heffernan, Babou Ceesay (last seen in "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story"), Carl Beukes (last seen in "The Girl"), Aaron Paul (last seen in "Central Intelligence"), Phoebe Fox, Lemogang Tsipa, Kim Engelbrecht, Gavin Hood (last seen in "Ender's Game"), Michael O'Keefe (last seen in "Michael Clayton"), Laila Robins (last seen in "True Crime"), Jessica Jones, Daniel Fox, Graham Hopkins (last seen in "Ali"), Francis Chouler (last seen in "The Borrowers" (2011)), Roberto Kyle, Lex King, Vusi Kunene, Barkhad Abdi (last seen in "Blade Runner 2049"), Warren Masemola, Ebby Weyime, Armaan Haggio, Aisha Takow.
RATING: 5 out of 10 plastic buckets
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