Alan Rickman in Eye in the Sky (Keith Bernstein/Bleecker Street)

Mid-20th-century war, heroism, and valor has been captured in films such as Saving Private Ryan. Urban guerrilla warfare in the 1990s dominated Black Hawk Down, and Zero Dark Thirty portrayed special ops forces in a compelling way. That kind of warfare—a small band of special operations forces dropped in a hostile, foreign land against long odds—is still with us but is more the exception than the rule. The most common, day-to-day war of today is an entirely new category of combat. Drone warfare has arisen only in the past decade and is so different that cinema has just begun depicting it.

The new movie Eye in the Sky has set the benchmark for film depictions of drone warfare, though it isn’t the first. 2014’s Good Kill, starring Ethan Hawke as a guilt-ridden, emasculated drone pilot, was good, but focused heavily on the effects of this isolated, abstract type of combat on a gung-ho fighter pilot who was born too late. Eye in the Sky deals effectively with this issue but also covers other aspects of drone warfare in an assured, encompassing way.

A lean, mean Helen Mirren plays Colonel Katherine Powell, the British officer in charge of carrying out operation Egret: a global effort to capture alive the fourth and fifth most wanted terrorists in East Africa. Powell’s “eye in the sky,” a drone carrying devastating Hellfire missiles, is operated by a pair of young Nevada pilots (Aaron Paul and Phoebe Fox). Both are young and inexperienced—neither has ever actually fired a missile.

Powell’s agent on the ground in Kenya, Jama Farah (Barkhad Abdi of Captain Phillips fame), controls a tiny, insect-shaped drone for views inside the house where the terrorists meet. The three provide Powell the information she needs to advise her superiors on what to do next. This cabal of high-level British commanders convenes in an operations room, where the final decisions rest.

The late Alan Rickman costars as Lieutenant General Frank Benson, the bemused, exasperated liaison between Powell and this elite power unit named COBRA. A running joke is the diffusion of responsibility, as no one wants to be too definitive in making the hard call—Benson is constantly telling Powell that the final decision is being “referred up” to another official.

Eye in the Sky follows these players, and many others, in this global tragicomic dance of uncertainty, fear, and godlike power. The contrast between the incredible technological precision and sophistication of the West’s machines of doom and the constant starts and stops, haggling, and seeming inefficiencies of decision-making on the human end is stark, absurd, and unsettling.

The core of the film is a prolonged standoff between the drone, hovering 20,000 feet above ground, and the terrorists in a house in a small Kenyan town. The operation has flown another drone, insect-sized, inside the house, giving the team a real-time look at the terrorist plot. Farah operates the drone with a small handset from a nearby alley, deep in hostile territory. Abdi is great as Farah negotiates with savvy the fleeting dangers of being discovered and as he expertly blends in, using his surroundings to evade suspicion in the heavily militarized Kenyan town.

Initially, Egret is solely a capture mission. However, the intel reveals that the terrorists are strapping bomb-laced vests to one of their members. This prompts Powell to urge her superiors to change the mission from capture to kill. This being a post-WikiLeaks world, the commanders are rightfully worried about footage of the strike ending up online for the world to see.

A further complication arises when, after finally getting the go-ahead, Powell orders the Nevada-based pilot of the drone, Steve Watts (Aaron Paul), to release a missile, and Watts spots a little girl selling bread right next to the house. Paul, as he was on Breaking Bad, is the moral center of this drama, and his idealism contrasts sharply with Powell’s steely-eyed pragmatism.

Drone warfare has become a thoroughly matter-of-fact, bureaucratic affair, rife with all the redundant inefficiencies and annoyances of any bureaucratic undertaking. Eye in the Sky depicts this aspect in exhaustive detail but without ever verging into outright farce. The result of all of this labyrinthine hand-wringing is pure tragedy. This speaks to a basic truth of our world today, with farce and tragedy coexisting side by side.