Eye in the Sky is a 2015 British action thiller film starring Helen Mirren, Aaron Paul, Alan Rickman, and Barkhad Abdi.

[3] Directed by Gavin Hood and written by Guy Hibbert, the film explores the ethical challenges of drone warfare.

From Northwood Headquarters, she takes command of a mission to capture three of the ten highest-level Al-Shabaab leaders meeting in a safe house in Nairobi.

Aerial surveillance is provided by a USAF MQ-9 Reaper drone controlled from Creech Air Force Base in Nevada by Second Lieutenant Steve Watts.

Undercover Kenyan field agents, including Jama Farah, use short-range ornithopter and insectothopter cameras to link in ground intelligence.

The mission is supervised in the United Kingdom by a COBRA meeting that includes British Lieutenant General Frank Benson, two full government ministers and a ministerial under-secretary.

She requests Watts to prepare a precision Hellfire missile attack on the building and solicits the opinion of her British Army legal counsel.

Benson asks permission from the COBRA members, who fail to reach a decision and refer the question up to the UK Foreign Secretary, presently on a trade mission to Singapore.

The lawyers and politicians involved in the chain of command argue the personal, political, and legal merits of and justification for launching a Hellfire missile attack in a friendly country not at war with the US or UK, with the significant risk of collateral damage.

Watts can see the more direct risk of little Alia selling bread outside the targeted building, and they seek to delay firing the missile until she moves.

Seeking authorisation to execute the strike, Powell orders her risk-assessment officer to find parameters that will let him quote a lower 45% risk of civilian deaths.

Benson counters that he has been on the ground in the aftermath of five suicide bombings and adds as he is leaving, provoking her to tears: "Never tell a soldier that he does not know the cost of war."

[21] Bleecker Street distributed the film in the United States,[22][23] releasing it in New York City and Los Angeles on 11 March 2016 and gradually expanding to additional markets on the following two weekends.

The site's consensus reads, "As taut as it is timely, Eye in the Sky offers a powerfully acted – and unusually cerebral – spin on the modern wartime political thriller.