"Missile away. Time of flight, 10 seconds. Splash... Good kill."

Good Kill. A movie that shows war from afar. It isn’t full of action scenes with the main character battling for his life. It doesn’t have blood and gore flying every which way, that you can see anyway. However, it’s still a movie about war. In this movie, Major Thomas Egan is an Air Force pilot/gunny for a UAV, an unmanned aerial vehicle, or what’s also known as a drone. He and his team, while living in the United States, are flying these drones in places like Afghanistan and Yemen killing people suspected of making bombs or being a part of a terrorist group with minimum civilian crossfire. They are proud of what they do, that is until a CIA group that they call “Langley” takes over their orders. Langley doesn’t care about the civilians, only the people suspected of terrorist acts, so when Major Egan and his group are ordered to shoot a building housing bomb making supplies and there are civilians around, they end up getting killed as well.

Rewind a little to about ten to fifteen minutes into the film. The group is watching a woman work and clean. Her son is playing with a soccer ball right outside the compound. A man with a gun enters the courtyard area and heads toward a door into the house where another woman is working. The woman in the courtyard goes over to talk to him to keep him from going into the house. He didn’t like that very much, so he grabs her, shoves her into a wall, and begins to rape her. An absolutely horrible and heart shattering scene. This will come up again and again throughout the movie and all they can do is watch.

The readings, which I found hard to compare to the movie and find distinct linearity, all kind of have the same concept behind them: war is difficult to justify. While there are some good things that come out of it, people still die. In the beginning of this movie, it was just the people they had intel on and that were highly suspected of being part of a terrorist group, which in the sense of war, can be determined to be a “good” thing. However, once Langley butts in, it’s not just about them anymore, it’s about them along with anyone who might be a sympathizer, even children. This is when it becomes “bad” and immoral. Children are too young, the next generation, the ones that could bring peace to a country or countries in turmoil, and yet they end up getting killed. Langley even had a group of people killed during a funeral service, which in my opinion, is an extremely low thing to do. By this point, Egan is being torn apart from the inside out, and not only is it destroying him, it’s also destroying his relationships with his wife and his children.

I believe Major Egan to be a strong man for doing what he does. At one point in the movie, he “accidentally” loses the feed on a truck with a woman and a child in the bed that he was ordered to blow up. Langley was none too happy about it. By the end of the movie, Egan’s family has left, he’s lost his promotion, one of his partners resigned, and Langley no longer wants to work with them. He has had enough of watching good people die. On his last day, he sends the only two people in his group out of the room. He takes this moment to watch the woman that they were in the beginning and, low and behold, the man has returned to rape the woman again. This time, however, he doesn’t get the chance because Egan takes him out with the drone. His final words: “Good kill.” The woman no longer has to suffer and Egan no longer has to take orders. It all ends with him leaving to find his family.

I honestly wasn’t expecting this movie to be the way that is was. I was expecting the normal gore-filled war movie. It turned out to be pretty great.