In a spartan air-conditioned shipping container somewhere in the Nevada desert, combat via joystick is being waged with real lives at stake. The air force has turned Top Gun Major Tommy Egan (Ethan Hawke) into a team leader for drone operators. They’re recruited in shopping malls on the strength of their gaming expertise and trained to kill targets 7,000 miles away. After work, Egan gets in his sports car and heads home to barbecue with his wife Molly (“Mad Men’s” January Jones) and their two young children. When Egan and his crew are given a wider license to kill by the CIA, selecting targets based not on personal profiles but patterns of activity, Egan’s anguish over playing god, and his ability to comply with his superiors’ directives, reaches a breaking point. Sci-fi futures with complex moral and political architecture are writer-director Andrew Niccol’s (“Gattaca,” “Lord of War”) specialty. And although this story is set back in 2010, when the use of drones was dramatically expanded, “Good Kill” still feels like a heady science fiction conversation piece—at once forward-thinking and exhilaratingly of the moment.