Director Gavin Hood is bursting to talk about his new project, Eye in the Sky. That's probably because his film, which debuts this weekend, involves many modern-day topics of discussion—things like the evolution of drone technology or the ethical implications of autonomous warfare.

What catches your eye first about Eye in the Sky is the tech. Even though Hood's movie is about drone warfare, the military-grade drone cruising over Kenya is not really what Eye in the Sky is about. Besides a few quick CGI-ish shots of a Reaper in flight, the bulk of the spying is done by an amusingly mechanical hummingbird drone and a tiny, camera-rigged mechanical beetle. Hood said that while the two drones aren't exactly plucked from a current military reality, both are based on prototypes that have been built (in the case of the hummingbird) or described as micro-air vehicles or MAVs (in the case of the beetle).

The director added that he didn't want to get too hung up on what's current today, because drone technology is changing quickly:

The technology is moving fast, what we show in the movies is by and large already present, the real question of the movie is knowing where we’re going, asking what is the right policy legally, politically, in the new world of automated weaponry...I hope what our audiences will do is focus less on our cameras...you can geek out on the tech stuff forever. [I wanted to ask audiences,] are we going to a place where there will be permanent armed surveillance, not just there [in foreign countries], but here?

Hood also mentioned two books he was reading on drone warfare, one called Kill Chain: The Rise of High-Tech Assassins and the other called A Theory of the Drone. He paused to read a paragraph from the latter that described a cloud of dragonflies in the sky that are, in reality, miniaturized drones that could be sent through a window. "The next step is that we have not just the single drones but a variety of drones that are aware of other drones in space," Hood said. "Now it’s just a matter of reducing their size."

An extension of Ender's Game

The Ars audience may know Hood from his work on the 2013 adaptation of the science fiction novel Ender's Game. I couldn't help but draw parallels between the detached, remote warfare of Ender's Game and that of Eye in the Sky.

The parallels extend beyond that though. One of the two heroes of Eye in the Sky is drone pilot Steve Watts (played by Aaron Paul of Breaking Bad), a man who dares to question the orders of his commanding officer despite the imposing fury brought to her by actress Helen Mirren. I couldn't help but see a bit of Ender in Watts' character too—a young kid, entrusted with a lot of responsibility, having to out-think the system he has to work within. "When I was making Ender's Game Harrison Ford said to me, 'this is really about drone warfare'," Hood told Ars. The director said that got him thinking about "how we prepare ourselves for this new world," so perhaps the Ender parallel isn't so far-fetched.

"We [Ford and Hood] would talk about this with audiences in Q and As, and meantime I’m reading scripts, and this script from Guy Hibbert comes across my desk and I couldn’t put it down," Hood continued. "It does feel like an extension of the ideas and themes in that film [Ender's Game]."

That's not to say Hood's new war story feels exactly like his last. The drama in Eye in the Sky is smaller in scope, and the future of the planet doesn't necessarily hang in the balance this time around. This new film also benefits from being based in reality. Drone warfare and the civilian casualties it tacitly accepts are already part of the grim news cycle we see every day. Hood's latest movie doesn't pick sides, but it does challenge us to think about how ethical it is to remove yourself from the battlefield.