Eye in the Sky was a movie I literally knew nothing about going in. I never saw a trailer, and based on what I knew on nothing more than the title. I thought this would be a science fiction movie. It was by no means a science fiction movie. The best way to describe it is a war on terror movie that really focuses on how mission objectives and moral decisions are sometimes. In terms of movie comparisons, I would say it is American Sniper meets Lone Survivor meets Platoon meets Lions for Lambs meets 2015’s little known Good Kill (as a quick aside, I would suggest seeing this movie before seeing Eye in the Sky. You’ll learn more about drone missions. Eye in the Sky sort of expects you to know a little about these without really explaining them). That is certainly a lot to compare. Ironically, American Sniper meets Lone Survivor were my favorite movies of the year (2014 and 2013, respectively), while Platoon was my third favorite movie of 1986. I mention this because I was not the biggest fan of Eye in the Sky. I know that the movie has done really well with the critics (92% on Rotten Tomatoes), but I felt it was a little loose and not drawn to the story as well as I could of. This and the combination of a really clunky beginning while also being a movie shot mostly in real-time, and you have a movie that felt like it failed in more avenues than it succeeded in. With that said, this wasn’t a bad movie, and it got much better the further you got into it.
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Category Archives: Helen Mirren
The Debt (2011)
The Debt is the second highly acclaimed Helen Mirren (The Last Station, Gosford Park) movie I watched last month. The first was The Queen, for which she won the Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role Academy Award. I had high expectations for The Queen and was disappointed by it. I found it boring and just not nearly as good as all the critics made it out to be. It also starred Michael Sheen (Frost/Nixon, Underworld), who I’m not the biggest fan of. I also had high expectations of The Debt, but they needed to be higher to see the movie in the theater. After watching it at home, seeing it on the big screen would not have been much different. The movie was a good movie that had a reasonably interesting (though not entirely believable) story that held my interest the entire time.
Continue reading The Debt (2011)