Set in the future, Harp (Damson Idris), a drone pilot, is sent into a deadly militarized zone where he finds himself working for Leo (Anthony Mackie), an android officer, tasked to locate a doomsday device before the insurgents do. Outside the Wire is directed by Mikael Håfström.
Damson Idris as Harp, Anthony Mackie as Leo, in Outside the Wire. (Photo: Jonathan Prime/Netflix)
14 Jan 2021
The trailer for the new Netflix movie Outside the Wire makes it look like a by-the-numbers sci-fi action movie, but the filmmakers are aiming for something more ambitious, telling a story about the perils of drone warfare and artificial intelligence.
What happens when you drop a drone operator onto the battlefield?
The movie opens in the year 2036. American troops are deployed to Ukraine as the nation is engaged in hostilities with Russia. A young drone operator named Thomas Harp (Damson Idris) disobeys orders to launch a missile into the middle of a firefight. He ends the conflict but kills a pair of American Marines on the ground. His rationale? There were 40 men on the ground, and I saved thirty-eight.
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Netflix January 15
The nature of that mission gets revealed bit by bit over the course of two fairly monotonous hours, during which Harp predictably discovers that war looks quite different on the ground than it did from the safety and comfort of a trailer in Nevada, thousands of miles away. Those fuzzy shapes on his monitor were real people, and now he’s one of them. Interspersed among the blunt moralism are battle sequences that, while passably exciting, mostly serve to illustrate just how ludicrously superhuman the average action-movie hero is. Despite taking place just 15 years from now,
Outside The Wire features robot soldiers that resemble