Gavin Hood's Eye in the Sky could almost serve as a training film for the British or US armed forces. How to think for yourself and maybe do the right thing when your finger is on the trigger. Otherwise it might be a sort of 21st century wartime propaganda movie showing the care exercised by the joint forces in an operation to take out an enemy cell bent on destruction.

Or maybe it’s neither. Following the politicians and soldiers caught up in the decision to remotely attack a terrorist cell with the likely collateral damage of a young bread-seller, this is effectively an anti-war film. In this light, it is disarmingly powerful.

For the big screen, it plays out a little too much like a TV drama, but is redeemed by solid performances from heavyweights Alan Rickman (to whom it is dedicated) and the totally dependable if not a little Mirren-like Helen Mirren, as the military commander Col. Katherine Powell, one providing perfect downbeat humour and both offering the grave face of military realism.

The film has two overlapping acts, carefully interlacing machinations in the corridors of power and the developing absurdity of deferred decisions, without taking away from the real tension of the scenes in Kenya where Barkhad Abdi plays an undercover field operative.

The score, both lush and menacing, lifts it above the realms of TV as does the cinematography, especially during Aaron Paul’s harrowing trial as the remote pilot tasked with carrying out the attack. This is a thought-provoking piece with a bitingly relevant moral conundrum at its core.