OBLIVION || Movie (2013) Review
OBLIVION || Movie (2013) Review
A bafflingly solemn, lugubrious and wonderfully derivative Science Fiction
Only recently, Tom Cruise looked as if he was attempting to grow twelve inches to play tall plug-ugly Jack Reacher; now his role-model appears to be Wall-E, the diminutive cartoon automaton left behind on a wrecked planet Earth to wash up.
Sadly there's none of Wall-E's spark during this bafflingly solemn, lugubrious and wonderfully derivative sci-fi which serves up great big undigested lumps of Total Recall, AI, Planet of the Apes – with little snippets of Top Gun.
Cruise plays Jack Harper, a troublesome and self-reliant soldier within the late 21st century, after a victorious but catastrophically destructive battle against alien invaders.
He has been tasked – along side the sleek and adoring Victoria, played by Andrea Riseborough – to watch what remains of Earth before humanity's final emigration, and to supervise a fleet of pilotless drone craft which seek out hostile "scavs", or scavengers, hiding out on the surface.
His short-term memory has been wiped so as to stop hostile forces getting intel from him, just in case of capture, but his orders are clear in what remains of his mind.
The humanity is to evacuate the earth (having farmed what hydroelectric energy it can from the oceans) then decamp to at least one of Saturn's moons – of all the unattractive places.
But Jack is plagued with weird mental images of a romantic encounter in pre-war ny and when he finds a gorgeous human survivor, Julia (Olga Kurylenko), she stirs intense memories, and it's clear that there's something the authorities aren't telling him.
This movie has some beautiful images of planetary ruin and large tracts of desert and forest with the topmost bits of famous buildings poking up.
There's not much actual rubbish and detritus around of the type that Wall-E had to affect , incidentally: an accelerated natural growth of trees and foliage has evidently covered up all that unsightly stuff, and everything is formed all the more spectacular on an Imax screen.
There are futurist aircraft whooshing through the mist, or being accepted into the bosoms of colossally large mother-ships call at space, just like the photorealist cover-designs of a classic SF novel.
But the story itself feels numbed, directionless and dull; Morgan Freeman is entirely wasted during a sketchily conceived supporting role and director and co-writer Joseph Kosinski allows Tom Cruise to play to his weaknesses.
There is little of the knowing humour and fun we saw within the mission films, just many shots of Tom doing his Action Hero face, at the controls of his elaborate helicopter-plane-device, or dropping athletically down on ropes, or on the macho motorbike he occasionally rides around on.
Could this last touch are a suggestion from the star himself? Sometimes he will do his Relaxed face, kicking back by the lakeside cabin he has found on Earth. Periodically he will do his uxorious-romantic smile, while showering or having breakfast or enjoying some preposterous underwater conjugal loving with Victoria in their swimming bath .
Victoria herself is dressed and styled as if for Planet Stepford; it's rather as if she is suppressing some emotional unhappiness. In another kind of film that learned, brittle smile of hers would crack and Victoria would spill a secret bottle of Percocets everywhere the kitchen floor before bursting into tears.
Oblivion goes on for an extended time, moving slowly and self-consciously, and it's sort of a very expensive movie project that has been written and rewritten repeatedly over. it's a shame: Cruise, Riseborough and Kurylenko because the last love triangle left on Planet Earth should are quite interesting.
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Topics
Science fiction and fantasy films
That's good review, Sir
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