Oblivion Leaves Its Viewers In Such A State

Directed by Joseph Kosinski

Written by Joseph Kosinski, Karl Gajdusek and Michael Arndt

Starring Tom Cruise, Olga Kurylenko, Andrea Riseborough, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Melissa Leo and Morgan Freeman

PG-13, 124 minutes

Oblivion wears its inspirations on its sleeve but leaves its heart on ice. It takes its sweet time building to something grand in scale but doesn’t fully stick the landing once it does due to a number of factors.

Tom Cruise is Jack Harper, a maintenance man in the post-apocalyptic future. He is one of the last two people who remain on Earth following a war with invading aliens that leaves the planet inhospitable. He repairs drones that collects resources from the surface in order to send it all to the moon Titan, where the remaining pockets of humanity settled. His partner is the beautiful yet somewhat icy Victoria (Andrea Riseborough). He collects the samples and she maintains communications with their supervisor Sally, played by a disturbing Melissa Leo.

A space ship wreck leads Jack to the discovery of a survivor, a woman in cryosleep. Her name is Julia, and she claims to be Jack’s wife. Played by Olga Kurylenko, Julia is not given much to work with in a script that capitalizes on the screen presence of Tom Cruise and shortchanges everyone else. This includes Morgan Freeman, too, who figures so heavily into the marketing but it would be generous to say he shows up for fifteen minutes of screen time as the leader of a shadowy underground resistance of humans against a lingering alien threat.

The movie feels like a two-pronged science-fiction tale that borrows a bit too heavily from recent genre fare. Take one part Wall-E and an equal portion of Duncan Jones’ Moon starring Sam Rockwell, put it into a bigger budget package with Tom Cruise in it and you basically have what Oblivion accomplishes despite being inferior to both movies mentioned. Taking influence from other works isn’t inherently a bad thing, but the movie doesn’t tackle its subject matter in as interesting a way as it could have given how the movie begins, with Cruise flying around the irradiated terrain and shacking up with Victoria on their abode in the clouds.

I will give credit where credit is due, one of the two big twists this movie throws at us I did not see coming. The other was fairly obvious from the first 15 minutes, but the other slightly less important one in the grand scheme of the film’s structure was very surprising. It was unfortunately when the movie careened into Moon territory, but it was still an injection of life into the proceedings following a dirge of blandness that marks the middle section of Oblivion.

Oblivion isn’t a total failure. Tom Cruise and the rest of the cast do their jobs well in a science-fiction package that allows for dazzling visuals and set-pieces in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It’s just that a sense of deja vu can’t be helped, and not the good kind, where we are fondly recalling something that allows us to appreciate what’s before us in a better light. No, it’s the kind of déjà vu that alerts us to the fact that we have seen this before, and done better.

2.5/4

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