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Tom Cruise goes all Top Gun (Olga Kurylenko is along for the ride, pretty much all she does in the movie) in would-be intellectual sci-fi thriller Oblivion |
Director: Joseph Kosinski
Cast: Tom Cruise (Jack Harper), Morgan Freeman (Malcolm
Beech), Olga Kurylenko (Julia Rusakova), Andrea Riseborough (Victoria Olsen),
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Sykes), Melissa Leo (Sally)
Spoilers: I’m going
to discuss the entire content of the plot from the third paragraph. You’ve been
warned!
It’s 60 years after an alien attack. The world has been
destroyed, cities lie in ruins, and mankind has fled to Jupiter’s moon Titan.
Earth is being drained of its last few resources to power the new civilisation
on Titan by massive machines. Drones fly around the planet, protecting the
machines from the last surviving alien forces still on Earth. The drones are
tended by Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) and Vika Wilson (Andrea Riseborough), whose
memories have been wiped for security reasons and who are dedicated to keeping
the drones functioning.
Or is this all a lie?
Well it won’t be a huge surprise to hear that it is, of course.
And there are some decent ideas in Kosinski’s film: the twist reveal that the
organisation Harper and Wilson are working so hard to preserve is in fact the
very alien invaders they so hate, or that the strange figures on the planet
they are helping the drones to kill are actually the last surviving remnants of
mankind. Harper and Wilson are clones of NASA astronauts captured 60 years ago
and replicated over and over again in order to serve the robots. The “Tet” in
space that they believe is their HQ is the alien mothership. These are all
decent twists. So why do they combine together to have so little real impact?
I think it’s because Kosinski rushes the film. He’s so
pleased with the narrative rug pulls that he seems to want to reveal many of
them one after the other. Additionally, the biggest twist – Tom Cruise is
actually working for the baddies! – immediately makes most of the rest easy to
predict. Not least the constant references to Base 49 where he and Vika work –
sure enough it’s a clone number, so the planet is filled with clones of this
pair. The only thing stopping them bumping into each other is that they have
been told everything outside of their “patrol zone” is irradiated and they must
never enter it.
All of this world building – and the film does take its time
establishing it a piece at a time early on – is interesting stuff. But it loses
its way once the film surrenders itself to a string of reveals that overwhelm
it. By the time we are watching super-man Jack shooting down drones from his
helicopter, the film seems to have lost the more meditative start. With Jack at
first we get a sense of a guy longing to find more depth to live with. But the
film loses this sense, with Jack become steadily less interesting the more we
find out about him.
Then once you accept the idea of Cruise and Riseborough
being endlessly cloned, the logic gap starts to click into place. It’s never
explained why the aliens are so reliant on human engineers for their drones –
if they have conquered loads of planets before without them, why do they need
them here? Furthermore, we are told the first wave of Jacks were mindless
soldiers who killed everyone on the planet – why then are these engineer Jacks
and Vikas given so much independent thought? Why not just make them automatons?
Why clone them and then lie to them about who they are working for – why not
just program them to obey the robots?
Then after a slow build of questions and revelations about
Jack’s world, we get a standard Independence
Day style mission up into space to “blow up the mother ship”. Of course
this is a mission that only your man Tom can do. And do it he does, because Tom
Gotta Do What Tom Gotta Do. It’s all a rather disappointing resolution to a
film that toys around with being something a bit more complex and interesting
earlier on.
Ah, Tom Cruise. To be honest he’s probably miscast here.
There is something so incredibly, movie-star strong about Cruise that he
somehow overpowers the shocks and make them seem silly. On top of which, the
part is another ego-stroke. Jack is the ultimate man’s man – he fixes things,
he loves sports, he builds a cabin in the woods, he’s clearly dynamite in the
sack; but he’s also sensitive and caring and in touch with his feelings. On top
of which both female characters in the film – Riseborough’s sadly besotted Vika
and Kurylenko’s mysterious astronaut who lands on Earth and awakens strange
memories in Jack – are both pathetic ciphers who need Tom’s help for
everything, while of course also being way, way, way too young for the Cruiser.
But the film still looks good, and still has some very
interesting twists. The design and visuals are faultless - in fact they seem to become the main focus, all those long shots of deserted, sand consumed parts of New York. Its main problem is
that it’s low on themes – I guess it’s trying to make a case that humanity
can’t be bashed out of us, no matter how many times we try and clone it out of
someone – but it gets lost a bit in plot mechanics and the delight the director
has in executing them. For a film that only really has four characters in it, I
still felt they were hazy and undefined. A lot is left to the viewer’s own
suppositions, so the film gets pretty reliant on your adding the depth it
needs. If you are inclined to do so, this works. But the essential dramatic
thrust of the film itself isn’t compelling enough to make you willing to make
the effort the film needs.
Oblivion wants to
be the next big, thoughtful, twist-filled, sci-fi epic. But it just doesn’t
have enough interest and complexity to really engage the viewer. Instead it all
becomes a bit forgettable – not because it’s bad but because, at the end of the
day, it’s nothing special.
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