Assassin Surfaces the Ethics of Drone Warfare Making Them People

In this episode of Castle Talk, Jason chats with Jesse Atlas, director and co-writer of Assassin, new from Saban Films in theaters, on-demand, and digital now. The film stars Andy Allo (Upload), Nomzamo Mbatha (Coming 2 America), with Dominic Purcell (DC’s Legends of Tomorrow) and Bruce Willis ( the Die Hard franchise) in his final role, and Mustafa Shakir (Luke Cage). The film was written by Aaron Wolfe and Jesse Atlas and directed by Atlas in his feature film debut. 

In the film, Mbatha’s character Alexa joins a secretive military operation that turns strangers into attack drones. In the futuristic program, once a target is chosen, the operative’s consciousness is projected into the body of an unsuspecting stranger close enough to kill the target. After learning the ropes, Mbatha’s assignment is to project into the body of an artist in the orbit of a wealthy, charismatic criminal played by Dominic Purcell. Bruce Willis plays a spy boss who is able to turn the job into an uncomplicated bullet point: “We kill the bad guys.”

In the chat, Atlas talks about how using a science fiction concept like body projection can give us the opportunity to think about common ethical problems in new ways. For instance, anytime Mbatha jumps into someone’s body to murder a target, the person doing the murder is a casualty as well: they wake up with no memory of having committed a crime. But as Atlas points out, real drones affect the people around the target as well. It’s not a pretty business. He laughs about how people around him had two responses when he told them the concept: a thrill of “that’s cool” and a sudden awareness of “that’s awful.” 

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