Movie Review - Oblivion
It's slightly weird. It wants to be a hard science fiction movie, but can't quite follow through with it.
A few decades after a war with interstellar invaders, which we technically won, Earth is an uninhabitable radioactive wasteland. Commander Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) is one of the last few people down on the surface, helping to oversee and guard massive power stations from the "scav"s - the scattered few remaining invaders, which can still be a guerilla threat to what's left of the infrastructure. Everyone else is in "The Tet", a massive space ship/station designed to take humanity to Titan, once enough fuel is gathered to complete the journey.
To help protect Earth's strategic plans, part of the conditioning for Jack and others like him, including his assistant/partner Victoria (Andrea Riseborough), includes having their entire memory wiped prior to the start of their assignment - now 5 years in their past. Without a personal history, but with images in dreams that can't be memories - having happened before he was born - and his only other human contact being his controller on The Tet - Sally (Melissa Leo) - Oblivion explores a very lonely existence, and opens up a lot of scope for examining the nature of identity.
Then Jack discovers a band of humans led by Malcolm (Morgan Freeman) living in caves, when no-one else should be on the surface. He has to start to question what he has been told about who and what is surviving on the surface. When he starts questioning that, what other questions does he need to start asking?
So Oblivion is cerebral and well plotted, regularly showing you things which cast existing knowledge in a new light. It provides plenty of scope for asking these big, interesting questions. And then decides not to bother answering them, but has a spectacular laser shoot-out instead.
It's not a bad laser shoot-out. It doesn't derail the film or anything; it fits with the rest of the plot, and it does provide a satisfying action climax. It just doesn't have quite the same tone as the rest of the movie.
I get the feeling that underneath the Tom Cruise sci-fi action movie, there lurks a serious indie science fiction film. (It certainly has echoes of one in particular, but I shan't mention it to prevent spoilers.) With Tom Cruise involved though, I imagine people started thinking about the kind of audience that were going to come and see it, and realised that it would be safer to cut out some of the more challenging parts of the script, throw a big laser shoot-out in at the end, oh, and can we add a voice-over to the beginning to explain the back-story clearly, in case not everyone picks it up as they go?
It's a good film, but it seems to have squandered the chance to be something especially clever and interesting.
A few decades after a war with interstellar invaders, which we technically won, Earth is an uninhabitable radioactive wasteland. Commander Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) is one of the last few people down on the surface, helping to oversee and guard massive power stations from the "scav"s - the scattered few remaining invaders, which can still be a guerilla threat to what's left of the infrastructure. Everyone else is in "The Tet", a massive space ship/station designed to take humanity to Titan, once enough fuel is gathered to complete the journey.
To help protect Earth's strategic plans, part of the conditioning for Jack and others like him, including his assistant/partner Victoria (Andrea Riseborough), includes having their entire memory wiped prior to the start of their assignment - now 5 years in their past. Without a personal history, but with images in dreams that can't be memories - having happened before he was born - and his only other human contact being his controller on The Tet - Sally (Melissa Leo) - Oblivion explores a very lonely existence, and opens up a lot of scope for examining the nature of identity.
Then Jack discovers a band of humans led by Malcolm (Morgan Freeman) living in caves, when no-one else should be on the surface. He has to start to question what he has been told about who and what is surviving on the surface. When he starts questioning that, what other questions does he need to start asking?
So Oblivion is cerebral and well plotted, regularly showing you things which cast existing knowledge in a new light. It provides plenty of scope for asking these big, interesting questions. And then decides not to bother answering them, but has a spectacular laser shoot-out instead.
It's not a bad laser shoot-out. It doesn't derail the film or anything; it fits with the rest of the plot, and it does provide a satisfying action climax. It just doesn't have quite the same tone as the rest of the movie.
I get the feeling that underneath the Tom Cruise sci-fi action movie, there lurks a serious indie science fiction film. (It certainly has echoes of one in particular, but I shan't mention it to prevent spoilers.) With Tom Cruise involved though, I imagine people started thinking about the kind of audience that were going to come and see it, and realised that it would be safer to cut out some of the more challenging parts of the script, throw a big laser shoot-out in at the end, oh, and can we add a voice-over to the beginning to explain the back-story clearly, in case not everyone picks it up as they go?
It's a good film, but it seems to have squandered the chance to be something especially clever and interesting.