Oblivion - film review

The planet is in Tom Cruise’s hands — along with the most preposterous movie he’s made in a while
1/2
2 May 2013

What do you need for the ultimate Tom Cruise vehicle? Vehicles! Check. Here Tom is mostly whizzing around in “the Bubbleship”, a cross between a jet fighter and a Bell helicopter that lands on three spidery legs and can also rocket into space when required. But he also has a groovy futuristic Moto Bike, a clean white chopper that unfolds in a flash, which he rides, helmetless, in shades, across glamorous deserts, when bored with the Bubbleship.

Weapons! Check. Tom has a brilliant hi-tech side arm in a holster on his hip, plus, strapped over his back, a special designer rifle. But he also has at his disposition whizzy drones, great big superfast metallic balls that zip through the sky, shoot out lasers to locate enemies and eliminate them with mighty guns that pop up from the sides of their glowering machine faces.

Lovely ladies in love with him! Check. First, there’s Andrea Riseborough (31 to Tom’s 50, playing 37) who dotingly looks after him at home, wearing the prettiest shift dresses, preparing candlelit dinners and plunging naked into their swimming pool for slinky sex. But then along comes Olga Kurylenko (33), even prettier and more seductive, her perfect complexion completely unimpaired by having crash-landed from space after being asleep for 60 years, fondly whispering his name as soon as she wakes up. Choices, choices!

A mission impossible! Check. Tom has to save the planet and the entire human race, against all the odds. Again.

Oblivion is set in 2077. Sixty years ago aliens came to ransack the planet and the world was destroyed in a nuclear conflict. Now mankind is preparing to leave for one of Jupiter’s moons, once all the power has been extracted from the oceans. Drone repairman Jack Harper (Cruise) and navigator Vika (Riseborough) remain on earth to protect the installations against hostile alien “scavengers”, enjoying the high life meanwhile in a remarkably stylish minimalist apartment perched right up there in the “Skytower”.

Jack has had his memory wiped but remains troubled by dreams of a previous life, centring on a crucial kiss with glorious Julia (Kurylenko) on top of the Empire State Building. Then she crashes back to Earth — and Jack saves her from the drones that are determined to kill her. Vika is not best pleased. But perhaps the whole set-up is not what Jack believes it to be?

Oblivion began life as a graphic novel by its director, Joseph Kosinski, who has a background in architecture and mechanical engineering; his first film, the highly worked computer game fantasia TRON: Legacy, grossed $400 million for Disney. He has certainly made Oblivion look good, shot in very high-res digital, although not, thank heavens, in 3D, on huge sets (one of them a ruined version of the New York Public Library, just like The Day After Tomorrow) and in evocative landscapes, including the stunning volcanic craters and black sand of Iceland.

It’s post-apocalypse chic — and, just like in much of the best science fiction, creating wondrous landscapes is the film’s main achievement. We now take it for granted that anything we can imagine can be pretty convincingly represented, but we shouldn’t. Wonder still drives cinema and the technology behind it continues to progress.

The problem with Oblivion is the human drama taking place in these great vistas. There are really only these three characters (although Morgan Freeman makes a ludicrous appearance as the leader of a rebel group). So it’s small-scale, even humdrum, yet at the same time quite preposterous. Jack and Vika row about Julia’s arrival on the scene like any squabbling couple. “There are things you need to know!” he tells her. “I don’t want to know!” she pettishly retorts. A touch of tongue-in-cheek humour would have helped but this is fantasy that takes itself entirely seriously.

Although the film is derivative (2001, Wall-E, I Am Legend, Top Gun, I could go on) and predictable (Tom goes rappelling, as he did in his last big hit, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol), it nonetheless makes no sense whatsoever in the end. This is one of those movies where, instead of totting up implausibilities (what do they eat? where did they get those clothes?), it’s actually more of a challenge to try to think of any way at all in which it could possibly hang together. If you like Tom Cruise, doing all those things he does best, you’ll certainly get lots of him though.

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