Oh, great… another Tom Cruise
flick… Have you ever noticed how some
people say that with such derision? I’ll
even admit that I’ve even said it a time or two myself. I’m not even one to hold the off-camera
couch-jumping and psychology-bashing against him to the point I’d refuse to buy
a ticket to a movie in which he stars, but you’ve got to admit that Tom Cruise is
a bit of an over-actor. Now, wait a
second - that’s not completely meant as a knock, as there are roles where
that’s appropriate, and some actors make a fine living doing it (you ever hear
of Nicolas Cage…?).
Something about all the
promotional clips I’ve seen for Oblivion
over the last few months have drawn me to it, though, despite seeing Jack Reacher not three months ago
and having Cruise’s… zeal, for lack of a better word… still fresh in my mind. Well, I shouldn’t say “something,” because I
know what drew me to it – director Joseph Kosinski. His first feature, the underappreciated Tron: Legacy was a visual feast,
and after seeing the trailers for his follow-up, I was fairly certain this
would be just as impressive. Lemme tell
ya - it’s nice to be right, folks.
The story he tells here is that some
sixty years after an alien attack upon Earth, humanity has defeated the
invaders, but has devastated the planet in the process. While the survivors are supposedly being
resettled on one of Saturn’s moons, Cruise’s Jack Harper and his
teammate/partner/lover Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) are stationed in one of
numerous work towers high above Earth’s surface as a maintenance crew,
servicing the automated drones that patrol the landscape searching for and
eradicating the remaining aliens.
Without going into too much detail of their memory of life before their
assignment being wiped and Jack’s troubling dreams of some pre-war life he
couldn’t possibly have lived, including a mysterious woman in those dreams (Olga
Kurylenko) who happens to (literally) fall out of the sky during the course of
the story, I’ll let you know that Jack comes to learn a lot of the things he
held as truths are definitely not so.
There are a lot of familiar sci-fi
elements here – a post-apocalyptic, dystopian setting; alien invasion; a
central character familiar with or longing for the world as it was before – so
a lot of the plot points can be seen coming a ways down the road, but that’s
okay. After all, any Western worth a
toot is going to have a gunfight in it, right?
Without saying that it’s exactly like such films as Logan’s Run or Silent
Running, it certainly had that same sort of feel to it. Call me crazy, but I even felt a little Planet of the Apes vibe, too,
with some of the things Jack comes to learn about the universe around him and
how he reacts to his discoveries. To his
credit, Cruise keeps his sometimes-manic energy level mostly in check here, and
it makes his character’s actions, predictable they may be, a lot more
interesting and believable.
It’s Kosinski’s visual style that drives
the film, though. Some of the plot
points that I may have been certain were about to crop up (and I was right more
often than not) were still made fairly effective by how little he showed the audience
leading up to them. Sure, I knew who
those dudes in the black leather really were.
Of course, that’s who that other Tech-dude checking out that downed
drone was while Jack watches from behind the sand dune. Certainly, Victoria would be at that place
when Jack arrives, almost half-expecting to see her. But, dang!
How cool to have it dropped on us like THAT! Even something as simple as having the
majority of the film take place in daylight is an effective choice, avoiding
the somewhat-cliché mood of the dark, rainy, depressing post-apocalyptic
pictures we’ve all seen before.
Those of us who dig sci-fi know it better than
most other movie-goers – if the movie is well-made, you can very quickly
forgive it being a little predictable (and even forgive it starring Tom Cruise),
so with that in mind, you ought to catch Oblivion
in the theater. You may not end up
loving it to the point you’d pre-order your Blu-ray as soon as you could, but
you’ll be glad you saw it on the big screen instead of waiting for HBO to run
it next year.
