On Apr. 1, the New York Times published a frontpage online feature titled, “Police Body Cameras: What Do You See?” asking readers to watch short body-cam videos of police-civilian altercations and answer questions about what went on. Two films, Eye in the Sky and Hardcore Henry, offer the audience a similar experience of viewing violence, but they take very different approaches. Eye in the Sky, directed by Gavin Hood, portrays modern warfare at its most diffuse and remote, compellingly dramatizing the difficult interpretive, ethical, legal, interpersonal and intergovernmental decisions that go into the execution of a drone strike. On the other hand, Hardcore Henry, directed by Ilya Naishuller, attempts to reimagine the ultraviolent sci-fi action film by filming it entirely in ‘first-person’ using GoPros, but the end product fails to meet its ambitions.

Chief among the accomplishments of Eye in the Sky is its deft orchestration of suspense in a film that is nearly entirely composed of people looking at screens. It opens with Colonel Katherine Powell (Helen Mirren), waking up in the middle of the night, walking through her English estate, and logging into a laptop. When her workday begins in earnest in a top-secret underground war room, she’s video-chatting, monitoring camera feeds from various drones, barking at her staff, and instant messaging with Lieutenant General Benson (Alan Rickman, in his final on-screen role), the military’s liaison to members of Parliament. Powell runs an antiterrorist operation, tracking down UK and US expat Islamic extremists in Nairobi with the aid of a US drone, remotely operated from a trailer in Nevada by Steve Watts (Aaron Paul).

The mission changes from “capture,” using the drone just for surveillance and the Kenyans for engagement, to “kill,” using missiles from the drone because of a bomb threat; but when their target is near an innocent little girl, final approval to pull the trigger bounces up and down the chain of command in a game of pass-the-buck via FaceTime. The plot is essentially the trolley problem, except the switch is thousands of miles away, it’s uncertain who or how many will die if it is pulled or not, and it’s even less clear who should pull it—or rather, tell someone to tell someone to pull it. With the audience viewing the scene through the perspective of the military personnel, unable to change anything in the perpetually changing ground situation, Hood demands that the viewer decide for themselves when the time is right to strike.

Of course, for all the equivocating of the higher-ups, the true burden falls on Watts, who is in the unenviable position of being the person who must ultimately pull the trigger—and Hood and Paul leave no doubt that Watts is tortured by the responsibility, despite the situation being ultimately out of his control. The acting is deft despite the relatively obvious motivations of the characters, and Guy Hibbert’s screenplay moves along at a fine clip. Despite a somewhat heavy-handed conclusion, the fact that Eye in the Sky’s ethical quandary is more “when” than “if” saves it from becoming overly moralizing.

While Eye in the Sky could be easily pigeonholed as “the drone movie,” Hardcore Henry comes a lot closer to replicating the experience of being a drone. Despite being marketed as “a first-person action film,” Henry feels more of a kind with Jay McInerney’s second-person novel Bright Lights, Big City. Henry, a cyborg super-soldier, has no voice and is driven by simple carrot/stick motivations—namely, a comely blonde wife (Haley Bennett) and the ruthless telekinetic industrialist who threatens him. While the plot lacks depth, the main acting attraction is South African sci-fi staple Sharlto Copley as Henry’s fairy-godmother-like friend Jimmy—in about a dozen guises and personas. Unfortunately, Jimmy’s energy frantically overcompensates for the fact that Henry has all the personality of a GoPro.

Clearly imitating the video game genre of the first-person shooter (FPS), Henry’s physical presence on-screen consists mostly of a tattooed arm, fully extended, gripping a gun. Yet while the video game player has some degree of agency and an established set of possibilities and goals, Hardcore Henry spends the bulk of its 90 minutes scrambling to compensate for the nonsensicality and incompatibility of a first-person film. It also targets the testosterone-fueled FPS audience, particularly in a pointless shootout in a strip club, bare breasts and bullets everywhere. Clearly, though, even teenage boys would rather be playing than watching.

Eye in the Sky and Hardcore Henry both revel in the cinema of exhaustion. The former builds emotionally draining suspense through deferred action just as the latter grows monotonous through ceaseless action. In both, the problem is that the only action, the only medium, is violence: for the soldiers in Eye in the Sky, the missile is the only form of communication between war room and front line. For Hardcore Henry, Ilya Naishuller’s willingness to embrace violence as the only medium is by far the greatest fault of a frenetic mess of a film. Henry has no relationship to anyone save ‘kill X’ or ‘kill those who want to kill X.’ Hardcore Henry proves that violence for the sake of violence becomes shallow and mindless if it fails to bring up the sort of difficult questions Eye in the Sky asks.

See these films and others at Bow Tie Criterion Cinemas in New Haven, 86 Temple St. Call (203) 498-2500 or visit www.BowTieCinemas.com for advance tickets.