"Good Kill" Will Have EVERYONE Talking About the "Invisible" Drone Wars

Ethan Hawke stars in Good Kill

The film Good Kill will have a week-long run at Chicago's Siskel Film Center in May (May 22 through 28). "The first film to deal seriously with America’s escalating use of drone warfare, this potent blend of war film and psychological drama centers on Tom Egan, a one-time fighter pilot who now sits in an air-conditioned trailer in Nevada and uses a video screen to fire missiles at suspected terrorists 7,000 miles away."

Reviewer Stephen Holden has written in The New York Times:

"makes a persuasive case that our blind infatuation with all-powerful technology is stripping us of our humanity . . . "

"transforming the ugly reality of battlefield carnage into a video game whose casualties are pixels on a screen . . . "

"Mr. Hawke’s anguished performance gives “Good Kill” a hot emotional center . . . "

" 'Good Kill' is really a contemporary horror movie about humans seduced and hypnotized by machines into surrendering their souls . . . "

(See "Warfare Waged Half a World Away," May 14, 2015)

It looks like this film is a must-see for anyone who cares about the way the US wages war today.


More and more creative works are taking on the problem of drone warfare. See:

Grounded raises tough questions. I was hoping that the play would challenge the idea that killing people with drones is good. It's a reflection of the seriousness of this work that that is just one of the issues it raises; others include our society's willingness to destroy the people who we employ to "serve" ("serve our country," serve us in general), our culture's worship of violence / use of force, and the consequences of pervasive surveillance.

(See "Everything Is Witnessed": Searching for "the Guilty" in GROUNDED )

Leveling Up is the creative work that demonstrates just how thoroughly America's new ways of warfare have become intertwined with the other dominant strands in our culture.

(See Level Up, Step Up, Grow Up, Man Up . . . Wake Up)












In Chicago on Good Friday, 2013 (March 29), a cast consisting of long-time Chicago antiwar activists was joined by a NY playwright (and defendant in actions against US drone bases), Jack Gilroy, for one of the events kicking off a month-long campaign of anti-drones events across the country: a performance of Gilroy's play, The Predator.

(See "The Predator" in Chicago - Good Friday, 2013 - "A Passion Play for the Drones Era")

There were so many places in this book where I thought, "Holy mackerel - he knows about that? It's as if he was part of the same anti-drone movement that I've been so deeply involved in for the past several years!"

(See 7 Ways the Ugly Facts About Drones Are Hidden in Plain Site in UNMANNED )