Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward
Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward is the first expansion pack to Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game developed and published by Square Enix for Microsoft Windows, Apple's OS X, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4. It was released on June 2015, nearly two years after the debut of A Realm Reborn. Naoki Yoshida served as director and producer and Nobuo Uematsu, who had not worked on the title since the ill-fated 2010 launch of the original Final Fantasy XIV, returned to collaborate with Masayoshi Soken on the soundtrack; the expansion pack was released as a standalone product for current players, as well as an "all-in-one" bundle containing A Realm Reborn and Heavensward. The latter was the only way to access the OS X version of the game, which premiered on the same day as the expansion pack's launch. Heavensward focuses on a millennium-long conflict known as the Dragonsong War between the Holy See of Ishgard and the dragon horde of Dravania. Players seek asylum in Ishgard after being falsely accused of murder and become involved in efforts to end the war.
These actions uncover an ancient conspiracy concerning the origins of the war. In addition to the new areas, the expansion pack increases the level cap, adds three new character classes and a new playable race, introduces flying gameplay through the use of airships and other airborne mounts. Heavensward performed well critically and earned nominations for "Expansion of the Year". In July 2015, Square Enix announced that the title had reached a cumulative total of five million subscriptions. However, the company suspended sales of the OS X version of the client that same month due to numerous reports of poor technical performance and offered refunds to those who purchased it. OS X sales resumed in February 2016; as with A Realm Reborn, major content patches were scheduled for every three months, though the first one—"As Goes Light, So Goes Darkness"—was delayed to November 10, 2015, to give the development team a break after shipping the expansion. The gameplay and quest structure of Heavensward match that of its base game.
As with many massively multiplayer online role-playing game, players interact with each other in a persistent world that responds to their actions. The biggest change to the combat is an increase of the level cap to level 60, which allows each fighting class to learn five new abilities that modify the flow of battle. Three new job classes are introduced as well—the abyssal tank Dark Knight, the gun-toting Machinist, the star-powered healer Astrologian; these jobs begin at level 30 with their own storylines connected to the new setting. Heavensward features new areas; the reason for the size increase is to accommodate flying gameplay. After completing certain quests and attuning to the air currents in an area, players gain the ability to use new flying mounts, such as airships, in that location. Flying allows access to unreachable points in the terrain. Airships built by player-run guilds have the ability to explore floating islands for rare materials, as well as the Diadem—an open world where players can challenge large monsters for high level gear and spoils.
In addition to new dungeons and raids, Heavensward introduces three new player versus player modes. The Feast is an updated four-versus-four arena in the Wolves' Den in which players attempt to defeat other players to collect their medals; the team with the most medals at the end of the match wins. Unlike the Fold of A Realm Reborn, players respawn automatically in this mode and item boxes appear periodically around the arena which provide offensive and defensive advantages to the team that breaks them open. Players who maintain a high rank in the Feast are awarded with unique gear and trophies at the end of a season. An unranked version exists for new players which features eight-versus-eight combat; the remaining new modes are for 24-player alliances to confront other Grand Companies. Seal Rock is a capture the flag-style mode in which players must occupy and defend randomly spawning resource nodes from other teams; the Fields of Glory involves destroying objects around the battlefield for points.
Heavensward takes place in the fictional world of Hydaelyn, a planet filled with multiple environments and climates covering three large continents. The region in which the game is set is called Eorzea; this expansion focuses on the Holy See of Ishgard in the snowy mountains of Coerthas. The three nations of the Eorzean Alliance—Gridania, Limsa Lominsa, Ul'dah—also play a role in the story, as does their adversary, the Garlean Empire. By flying, players are able to explore Dravania, the homeland of the dragons, islands floating in the Sea of Clouds above the Abalathia's Spine mountain range. In Dravania, the ruined remains of Sharlayan, a city-state, evacuated during the first Garlean invasion, have given rise to Idyllshire, a free city founded by goblins upon democratic principles; the primary conflict of Heavensward is the ongoing Dragonsong War between Ishgard and Nidhogg's horde of dragons. The Ishgardian orthodoxy suggests that this thousand-year struggle originated when the Elezen first settled in Eorzea.
King Thordan, purportedly led by the will of the deity Halone, was commanded to build a city upon Abalathia's Spine. This action angered the great wyrm Nidhogg who confronted his knights twelve. After a tremendous battle which wiped out many of his knights as well as Thordan himself, Thordan's son Haldrath took up his father's spear and carved out Nidhogg's eye. Nidhogg retreated and his eye became an Ishgardian relic with ties to the Azure Dragoon, a title given to the dragoon blessed by the eye's power. Since Nidhogg has w
Ripper Street
Ripper Street is a British TV series set in Whitechapel in the East End of London and starring Matthew Macfadyen, Jerome Flynn, Adam Rothenberg. It begins in 1889, six months after the infamous Jack the Ripper murders; the first episode was broadcast on 30 December 2012 during BBC One's Christmas schedule and was first broadcast in the United States on BBC America on 19 January 2013. Ripper Street returned for a second eight-part series on 28 October 2013. On 4 December 2013, it was reported that a third series would not be made due to low viewing figures for series two. On 11 December 2013, Variety reported negotiations between the show's producer Tiger Aspect and LoveFilm to fund future episodes, similar to Netflix funding episodes of Arrested Development. On 26 February 2014, it was confirmed. Filming began in May 2014. Series three began streaming on Amazon UK Prime Instant Video on 14 November 2014 but was not made available on Amazon's US site; the third series began airing on BBC America on 29 April 2015, on BBC One on 31 July 2015.
In June 2015, the series was renewed for a fifth series. In 2016, it was announced. Series 4 premiered on Amazon UK on 15 January 2016, on BBC America on 28 July 2016, in the United Kingdom on BBC Two from 22 August 2016; the concluding fifth series premiered in full on Amazon UK on 12 October 2016. The series begins in April 1889, six months since the last Jack the Ripper killing, in Whitechapel the H Division is responsible for policing one and a quarter square miles of East London: a district with a population of 67,000 poor and dispossessed; the men of H Division had failed to find him. When more women are murdered on the streets of Whitechapel, the police begin to wonder if the killer has returned. Among the factories, chop shops and pubs, Detective Inspector Edmund Reid and Detective Sergeant Bennet Drake team up with former US Army surgeon and Pinkerton agent Captain Homer Jackson to investigate the killings, they cross paths with Tenter Street brothel madam Long Susan, who came to London with Jackson from America and lets him reside at the brothel.
Their relationship becomes strained due to Jackson's attraction to one of her most profitable girls, Rose Erskine, because of his close involvement with Reid and H Division. Reid and his wife Emily only have one daughter, lost and presumed deceased, some months before the series begins, in a river accident during the hunt for the Ripper; the newspaper reporter, Fred Best, knows a dark secret about her death. Although still troubled, despite her husband's reservations, Emily is determined to make a new life for herself by helping the fallen women of Whitechapel; the second series is set in 1890. Emily has left Reid. Rose Erskine has left Long Susan's brothel to work as a waitress at the music hall, Blewett's Theatre of Varieties. Sergeant Drake has married another of Bella. A new detective constable, Albert Flight, is introduced. Reid crosses swords with the ruthless Inspector Jedediah Shine. Ten years an Inspector on the Hong Kong police force, Shine has used that experience to exert a firm grip over Limehouse’s neighbouring "K" Division and the emergent Chinatown that grows within it.
Long Susan, happy as brothel keeper, is in debt to Silas Duggan, who lent her funds to start the business, unbeknownst to Jackson who wants to leave London. Historical backdrops to episodes in series 2 include Chinese immigration, the London matchgirls strike of 1888, electrical War of Currents, the Cleveland Street scandal, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Joseph Merrick, the Baring crisis. In 1894, a train accident in Whitechapel kills fifty-five civilians. At the scene of the accident, Drake, Rose Erskine and Long Susan are reunited after a long period of separation. Reid discovers that it was caused by a heist; the organiser is Ronald Capshaw. His intention is to steal US bearer bonds in order to bail out their financially stricken Obsidian Estates and to continue in their attempt to gentrify Whitechapel. Mathilda is discovered by Capshaw to be still alive, although Reid is told by Susan that she has died since being rescued. Mathilda is picked up by Harry Ward, a teenage pimp. Receiving a tip-off where she was last seen and Bennett find her, but she runs away.
Reid returns to his father and daughter reunite. Series 4 opens in the year of Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee. Reid is living in Hampton-on-Sea with Matilda, he is drawn back to Whitechapel after a visit from Deborah Goren, who urges him to return to investigate the murder of a rabbi at the hand of Isaac Bloom, whom she believes innocent. Meanwhile, Drake is now head inspector of Whitechapel and still employs Jackson, who has given up his drinking and gambling in order to save money to free Susan, now sentenced to hang for her crimes; when his attempts to free her fail, he helps to fake her death, forcing her to give up their son to be raised by Drake and his wife Rose, while Susan hides out of sight and Jackson pretends to be a grieving widower to his friends. Series 5 continues the events of the tragic ending of series 4. A joint BBC and BBC America production written by Richard Warlow, Julie Rutterford, Declan Croghan and Toby Finlay and directed by Andy Wilson, Colm
Great Expectations
Great Expectations is the thirteenth novel by Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel: a bildungsroman that depicts the personal growth and personal development of an orphan nicknamed Pip. It is Dickens's second novel, after David Copperfield, to be narrated in the first person; the novel was first published as a serial in Dickens's weekly periodical All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. In October 1861, Chapman and Hall published the novel in three volumes; the novel is set in Kent and London in the early to mid-19th century and contains some of Dickens's most memorable scenes, including the opening in a graveyard, where the young Pip is accosted by the escaped convict, Abel Magwitch. Great Expectations is full of extreme imagery—poverty, prison ships and chains, fights to the death—and has a colourful cast of characters who have entered popular culture; these include the eccentric Miss Havisham, the beautiful but cold Estella, Joe, the unsophisticated and kind blacksmith.
Dickens's themes include wealth and poverty and rejection, the eventual triumph of good over evil. Great Expectations, popular both with readers and literary critics, has been translated into many languages and adapted numerous times into various media. Upon its release, the novel received near universal acclaim. Although Dickens's contemporary Thomas Carlyle referred to it disparagingly as that "Pip nonsense," he reacted to each fresh instalment with "roars of laughter." George Bernard Shaw praised the novel, as "All of one piece and truthful." During the serial publication, Dickens was pleased with public response to Great Expectations and its sales. On Christmas Eve, around 1812, Pip, an orphan, about seven years old, encounters an escaped convict in the village churchyard, while visiting the graves of his parents and siblings. Pip now lives with her kind husband Joe Gargery, a blacksmith; the convict scares Pip into stealing a file. Early on Christmas morning Pip returns with a pie and brandy.
During Christmas Dinner that evening, at the moment Pip's theft is about to be discovered, soldiers arrive and ask Joe to repair some shackles. Joe and Pip accompany them as they recapture the convict, fighting with another escaped convict; the first convict confesses to stealing food from the smithy. A year or two Miss Havisham, a wealthy spinster who still wears her old wedding dress and lives as a recluse in the dilapidated Satis House, asks Mr Pumblechook, a relation of the Gargery's, to find a boy to visit her. Pip falls in love with her adopted daughter Estella. Estella remains hostile to Pip, which Miss Havisham encourages. Pip visits Miss Havisham until he is old enough to learn a trade. Joe accompanies Pip for the last visit, when she gives the money for Pip to be bound as apprentice blacksmith. Joe's surly assistant, Dolge Orlick, is envious of dislikes Mrs Joe; when Pip and Joe are away from the house, Mrs Joe is brutally attacked, leaving her unable to speak or do her work. Orlick is suspected of the attack.
Mrs Joe becomes kind-hearted after the attack. Pip's former schoolmate Biddy joins the household to help with her care. Four years into Pip's apprenticeship, Mr Jaggers, a lawyer, tells him that he has been provided with money, from an anonymous benefactor, so that he can become a gentleman. Pip is to leave for London. Pip sets up house in London at Barnard's Inn with Herbert Pocket, the son of his tutor, Matthew Pocket, a cousin of Miss Havisham. Herbert and Pip have met at Satis Hall, where Herbert was rejected as a playmate for Estella, he tells Pip how Miss Havisham was defrauded and deserted by her fiancé. Pip meets fellow pupils, Bentley Drummle, a brute of a man from a wealthy noble family, Startop, agreeable. Jaggers disburses; when Joe visits Pip at Barnard's Inn, Pip is ashamed of him. Joe relays a message from Miss Havisham. Pip returns there to meet Estella and is encouraged by Miss Havisham, he is disquieted to see Orlick now in service to Miss Havisham. He mentions his misgivings to Jaggers.
Back in London and Herbert exchange their romantic secrets: Pip adores Estella and Herbert is engaged to Clara. Pip meets Estella. Pip and Herbert build up debts. Mrs Joe Pip returns to his village for the funeral. Pip's income is fixed at £ 500 per annum. With the help of Jaggers' clerk, Pip plans to help advance Herbert's future prospects by anonymously securing him a position with the shipbroker, Clarriker's. Pip takes Estella to Satis House, she and Miss Havisham quarrel over Estella's coldness. In London, Bentley Drummle outrages Pip, by proposing a toast to Estella. At an Assembly Ball in Richmond, Pip witnesses Estella meeting Bentley Drummle and warns her about him. A week after he turns 23 years old, Pip learns that his benefactor is the convict he encountered in the churchyard, Abel Magwitch, transported to New South Wales after that escape, he can not return to England on pain of death. However, he returns to see Pip, the motivation for all his success. Pip is shocked, stops taking money from him.
Subsequently and Herbert Pocket devise a plan for Magwitch to escape from England. Magwitch shares his past history
Luther (TV series)
Luther is a British crime drama television series starring Idris Elba as the title character DCI John Luther, written by Neil Cross. The first series comprised six episodes which ran in May and June 2010. A second series of four episodes aired on BBC One in June and July 2011. A third series was commissioned in 2012, comprising four episodes which aired in July 2013. A two-episode fourth series was broadcast in December 2015. A fifth series of four episodes premiered on 1 January 2019. BBC Studios handles the distribution of the series. Elba has received critical acclaim for his role as John Luther and has been awarded a Critics' Choice Television Award, Golden Globe Award, NAACP Image Award, Screen Actors Guild Award for his performance; the series has received eleven Primetime Emmy Award nominations in various categories, including four nominations of Elba for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or Movie. John Luther is a Detective Chief Inspector working for the Serious Crime Unit in series one, the new "Serious and Serial" unit from series 2.
A dedicated police officer, Luther is obsessive and sometimes violent. However, Luther has paid a heavy price for his dedication. For Luther, the job always comes first, his dedication is both for him and those close to him. In the first episode of the series he investigates brilliant psychopath and murderer Alice Morgan, he is unable to arrest her due to lack of evidence, but as the programme progresses, she becomes both his nemesis and unlikely companion. As she pursues her infatuation with him, he relents as he is able to glean insight from her about some of the cunning criminals he pursues. After Alice helps Luther avenge the death of his estranged wife Zoe, Luther aids her escape from a secure facility and she flees the country. In Alice's absence, Luther's life is dominated by his police work once again, culminating in the murder of his partner and protégé Justin Ripley in the third series. Alice reappears following Ripley's death, convinces Luther to leave London with her; when the fourth series begins, Luther is living a reclusive life on the English coast.
After learning of Alice's apparent death in mysterious circumstances, he is persuaded to return to London and resume his role as a DCI. It transpires that Alice faked her own death after her life with Luther did not match their expectations. Two years she returns to extort money from organised crime boss George Cornelius, who sabotaged her previous diamond exchange. Embroiled in her schemes again, Luther's relationship with Alice heads towards its destructive climax; the first series of Luther aired in 2010 and received positive reviews from critics, getting an average of 5.9 million viewers per episode. In August 2010, the BBC announced that it had commissioned a second series for 2011. Filming started in late September/early October 2010. Planned to be broadcast as two two-hour episodes, it was shown as four one-hour episodes; the first episode was shown on BBC One on 14 June 2011. In August 2011, the BBC One controller announced. Filming of the four-episode series started in November 2012. Sienna Guillory was cast as Luther's new love interest.
Other guest stars included Ned Dennehy. The third series concluded on 23 July. On 19 November 2014, it was announced that a two-episode special would be aired on the BBC in 2015. Filming began in March 2015 and ended April 2015. BBC Home Entertainment confirmed that the Region 1 version of the Series 4 DVD would be released on 15 December 2015, coinciding with the air date of the fourth series. On 24 October 2015, BBC One confirmed via their Facebook page that series 4 of Luther would air in December 2015 on BBC One. In November 2015, it was announced that Luther was confirmed to air in the United States on BBC America for a three-hour one-night event on 17 December 2015; the first episode of the fourth series aired on BBC One on 15 December 2015. A fifth series comprising four episodes was announced on 12 June 2017. Filming started in early 2018. Ruth Wilson was confirmed to be returning as Alice Morgan for series five. Series 5 directed by Jamie Payne premiered on 1 January 2019, was broadcast over consecutive nights until 4 January.
Creator Neil Cross has said that Luther is influenced by Columbo. The first series was filmed in and around London and produced by BBC Drama Productions. Brian Kirk, Sam Miller and Stefan Schwartz each directed two episodes and show creator Neil Cross wrote all six of the episodes. Leila Kirkpatrick was the line producer for the entire program and Katie Swinden was the producer for a number of episodes. Tim Fleming provided cinematography for two episodes. Katie Weiland and Victoria Boydell were involved with Weiland editing two episodes. Andy Morgan was responsible for all casting, Paul Cross provided production design and Adam A. Makin was behind the show's art direction; the show is filmed in various locations around Central, North and East London including the Barbican Estate and Castle, Westfield Shopping Centre, Renaissance Hotel, Ealing Hospital, Cranbrook Estate, Victoria Park, Waterloo station, Holloway and the Docklands. Series one was met with positive reviews, according to aggregate review site Rotten Tomatoes, where it holds a 95% approval rating, based on 19 rev
Susanna Clarke
Susanna Mary Clarke is an English author best known for her debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, a Hugo Award-winning alternative history. Clarke worked on it during her spare time. For the next decade, she published short stories from the Strange universe, but it was not until 2003 that Bloomsbury bought her manuscript and began work on its publication; the novel became a best-seller. Two years she published a collection of her short stories, The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories. Both Clarke's novel and her short stories are set in a magical England and written in a pastiche of the styles of 19th-century writers such as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. While Strange focuses on the relationship of two men, Jonathan Strange and Gilbert Norrell, the stories in Ladies focus on the power women gain through magic. Clarke was born on 1 November 1959 in Nottingham, the eldest daughter of a Methodist minister and his wife. Due to her father's posts, she spent her childhood in various towns across Northern England and Scotland, enjoyed reading the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen.
She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy and economics from St Hilda's College, Oxford in 1981. For eight years, she worked in publishing at Gordon Fraser, she spent two years teaching English as a foreign language in Turin and Bilbao, Spain. She returned to England in 1992 and spent the rest of that year in County Durham, in a house that looked out over the North Sea. There she began working on Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. In 1993, she was hired by Simon & Schuster in Cambridge to edit cookbooks, a job she kept for the next ten years. Clarke first developed the idea for Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell while she was teaching in Bilbao: "I had a kind of waking dream... about a man in 18th-century clothes in a place rather like Venice, talking to some English tourists. And I felt that he had some sort of magical background – he'd been dabbling in magic, something had gone badly wrong." She had recently reread J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and afterward was inspired to " writing a novel of magic and fantasy".
After she returned from Spain in 1993, Clarke began to think about writing her novel. She signed up for a five-day fantasy and science-fiction writing workshop, co-taught by science fiction and fantasy writers Colin Greenland and Geoff Ryman; the students were expected to prepare a short story before attending, but Clarke only had "bundles" of material for her novel. From this she extracted "The Ladies of Grace Adieu", a fairy tale about three women secretly practising magic who are discovered by the famous Jonathan Strange. Greenland was so impressed with the story that, without Clarke's knowledge, he sent an excerpt to his friend, the fantasy writer Neil Gaiman. Gaiman said, "It was terrifying from my point of view to read this first short story that had so much assurance... It was like watching someone sit down to play the piano for the first time and she plays a sonata." Gaiman showed the story to science-fiction writer and editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden. Clarke learned of these events when Nielsen Hayden called and offered to publish her story in his anthology Starlight 1, which featured pieces by well-regarded science-fiction and fantasy writers.
She accepted, the book won the World Fantasy Award for best anthology in 1997. Clarke spent the next ten years working on the novel in her spare time, she published stories in Starlight 2 and Starlight 3. Overall, she published seven short stories in anthologies. "Mr Simonelli, or The Fairy Widower" was shortlisted for a World Fantasy Award in 2001. Clarke was never sure if it would be published. Clarke tried to write for three hours each day, beginning at 5:30 am, but struggled to keep this schedule. Rather than writing the novel from beginning to end, she wrote in fragments and attempted to stitch them together. Clarke, admitting that the project was for herself and not for the reader, "clung to this method" "because I felt that if I went back and started at the beginning, would lack depth, I would just be skimming the surface of what I could do, but if I had known it was going to take me ten years, I would never have begun. I was buoyed up by thinking that I would finish it next year, or the year after next."
Clarke and Greenland moved in together. Around 2001, Clarke "had begun to despair", started looking for someone to help her finish and sell the book. Giles Gordon became her first literary agent and sold the unfinished manuscript to Bloomsbury in early 2003, after two publishers rejected it as unmarketable. Bloomsbury were so sure, they printed 250,000 hardcover copies in the United States and Germany. Seventeen translations were begun before the first English publication was released on 8 September 2004 in the United States and on 30 September in the United Kingdom. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is an alternative history set in 19th-century England during the Napoleonic Wars, it is based on the premise that magic once existed in England and has returned with two men: Gilbert Norrell and Jonathan Strange. Centering on the relationship between these two men, the novel investigates the nature of "Englishness" and the boundary between reason and madness, it has been described as a fantasy novel, an alternative history, an historical novel and dr
Système universitaire de documentation
The système universitaire de documentation or SUDOC is a system used by the libraries of French universities and higher education establishments to identify and manage the documents in their possession. The catalog, which contains more than 10 million references, allows students and researcher to search for bibliographical and location information in over 3,400 documentation centers, it is maintained by the Bibliographic Agency for Higher Education. Official website
Eye in the Sky (2015 film)
Eye in the Sky is a 2015 British thriller film starring Helen Mirren, Aaron Paul, Alan Rickman, Barkhad Abdi. Directed by Gavin Hood and based on a screenplay by Guy Hibbert, the film explores the ethical challenges of drone warfare. Filming began in South Africa in September 2014. There was a 2009 article of the same title written by Major Timothy Allen Johnson Sr about USAF ISR Operations in the Middle East; the film premiered at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival on 11 September 2015. Bleecker Street distributed the film in cinemas in the United States with a limited release on 11 March 2016 and a wide release on 1 April, it is the last live action film to feature Alan Rickman, who died in January 2016. The film was dedicated to his memory; the film opens in Nairobi, where Alia Mo'Allim, a young girl, twirls a hula hoop made by her father in their backyard. British Army Colonel Katherine Powell wakes up early in the morning and hears that an undercover British/Kenyan agent has been murdered by the Al-Shabaab group.
From Northwood Headquarters she takes command of a mission to capture three of the ten highest-level Al-Shabaab leaders, who are meeting in a safehouse in Nairobi. These include Susan Helen Danford and her husband. A multinational team works on the capture mission, linked together by voice systems. Aerial surveillance is provided by a USAF MQ-9 Reaper drone controlled from Creech Air Force Base in Nevada by USAF pilot, 2d Lt Steve Watts. Undercover Kenyan field agents, including Jama Farah, use short-range ornithopter and insectothopter cameras to link in ground intelligence. Kenyan special forces are positioned nearby to make the arrest. Facial recognition to identify human targets is done at Joint Intelligence Center Pacific at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii; the mission is supervised in the United Kingdom by a COBRA meeting that includes British Lieutenant General Frank Benson, two full government ministers and a ministerial under-secretary. Farah discovers that the three high-level targets are now arming two suicide bombers for what is presumed to be an attack on a civilian target.
Powell decides that the imminent bombing changes the mission objective from "capture" to "kill". She informs drone pilot Watts to prepare a precision Hellfire missile attack on the building, solicits the opinion of her British Army legal counsel. To her frustration, her counsel advises her to seek approval from superiors. Benson asks permission from the COBRA members. Citing conflicting legal and political views and contrasting the tactical value of the assassination with the negative publicity of killing civilians and the status of some of the targets as American or British nationals, they fail to reach a decision and refer the question up to the UK Foreign Secretary, presently on a trade mission to Singapore, he does not offer a definite answer and defers to the US Secretary of State, presently on a cultural exchange in Beijing, who declares the American suicide bomber an enemy of the state. The Foreign Secretary insists that COBRA take due diligence to minimise collateral damage. Alia, who lives next door, is now near the target building selling her mother's bread.
The senior military personnel argue the risk of letting three high-level terrorist leaders, two real-time suicide bombers, leave the house. The lawyers and politicians involved in the chain of command argue the personal and legal merits of and justification for launching a Hellfire missile attack in a friendly country not at war with the US or UK, with the significant risk of collateral damage. Watts and his enlisted sensor operator, A1C Carrie Gershon, can see the more direct risk of little Alia selling bread outside the targeted building, they seek to delay firing the missile until she moves. Farah is directed to try and buy all of Alia's bread so she will leave, but after paying her his cover is blown and he is forced to flee. Alia retrieves the bread he sits down to sell it a second time. Seeking authorisation to execute the strike, Powell orders her risk-assessment officer to find parameters that will let him quote a lower 45% risk of civilian deaths, he re-evaluates the strike point and assesses the probability of Alia's death at 45–65%.
She makes him confirm only the lower figure, reports this up the chain of command. The strike is authorised, Watts fires a missile; the building is destroyed, with Alia unconscious. However, Danford survived. Watts is ordered to fire a second missile, her parents suffer some injuries and rush Alia to a hospital. In the London situation room, the under-secretary tearfully berates Benson for killing from the safety of his chair. Benson counters that she watched while having coffee and biscuits, whereas he has been on the ground at five suicide bombings and adds: "Never tell a soldier that he does not know the cost of war." The end credits begin rolling back to the beginning of the movie, with Alia shown twirling her hula hoop. Eye in the Sky is directed by Gavin Hood based on a screenplay by Guy Hibbert; the screenplay was a project being developed at BBC Films, FilmNation Entertainment acquired Hibbert's screenplay from BBC in September 2011 for Oliver Hirschbiegel to direct. Production did not happen as anticipated, Hood sent the screenplay to Xavier Marchand, president of Entertainment One.
Marchand decided to develop it to produce a film with Hood directing. Entertainment One partnered with Raindog Films in April 2014 to produce Eye in the Sky with Colin Firth as one of the producers. Actors Helen Mirren and Aaron Paul joined the cast the following month. Hood, born in South Africa, chose to film Eye in the Sky in his
