PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE INTENSE: Movie reviews of Good Kill and Tomorrowland by Howard Casner

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Warning: SPOILERS

good killI have recently seen a movie that, for my money, is more intense, suspenseful and edge of your seat than Mad Max: Fury Road, Furious 7, The Avengers: Age of Ultron and Tomorrowland put together.

But it’s also a much smaller film than any of those; smaller in budget, in size, in CGI.

It’s more than all of those adverbs, I suspect, because it is about a real person put into a real situation, a situation of profound psychological and moral conflict. In the above movies, all the characters had to worry about was the end of their existence.

In the movie I am referring to, Good Kill, our central character has something far greater at stake: the end of his soul.

The basic story line revolves around one Major Thomas Egan, just about the best drone pilot there is. And his job, day in, day out, is to locate the bad guys in the Middle East and blow them up from thousands of miles away. His bliss is basically the same as Chris Kyle in American Sniper, but he gets to do it from the comfort of a chair in an air conditioned unit on a base in Nevada, not far from the R&R resort of Las Vegas. Read the rest of this entry »