Here is a fit subject for a film. The modern US war is, to a depressing extent, fought from shipping containers in remote corners of the American west. A few miles from Las Vegas, young men and women pilot drones into Afghanistan and rain death like part-time gods.

You can see the possibilities. This is not PlayStation. These are real lives. Mind you, many operatives are bored gamers hired from malls. Why are they killing Afghans just for owning AK-47s? What about their “right to bear arms”? They’re murdering children. When did they become the terrorists? The US is a superpower that’s going to die. Nobody ever won a war in Afghanistan.

These are good questions and worthwhile observations. The problem is they are all stated explicitly in a script that plays like a series of didactic footnotes for a much more interesting film. In the opening act, Bruce Greenwood, commander of the facility, delivers an equivocal welcoming speech that, with its satirical, despairing tone, would surely trigger a court martial in the real world.

Elsewhere, an appalled, liberal rooky (Zoë Kravitz) argues with the archetypal, red-necked good old boys who remain convinced each explosion makes America that little bit safer. (What the hell was she expecting?) Have you got this? Would you like a slide show as well?

Happily, a strong central performance by Ethan Hawke just about holds the film together. He plays Tom Egan, a former fighter pilot who finds his skills now something of a luxury. Moral poison is eating away at his marriage and driving him back to drink. Eventually, he becomes tempted to sabotage his own drone missions.

Andrew Niccol, director of Gattaca, pulls off a few interesting visual coups. The birds-eye views of Tom's home rhyme with the satellite images he scrutinises at work. The sounds of the operations are chillingly inhuman.

For all that, this feels like something of a botched operation – more of a conversation piece than a fully formed film.