Oblivion (2013)
I haven't seen an awful lot of promotion for this big-budget sci-fi film. However, it was pointed out to me by a friend and initially the director on the project made me rather sceptical. Joseph Kosinski's previous movie was none other than Tron Legacy (to which I gave a whopping D+ score).
The thing that intrigued me however is that this movie is actually based on a comic book that Kosinski wrote himself. Kosinski is not credited as one of the writers on "Tron Legacy". Now let's face it, normally a director does not begin their career with a big budget action movie. It's more common for them to begin with something smaller that they wrote themselves and then move on to personal projects afterwards.
Now "Tron Legacy" wasn't all bad. It looked great and the action scenes were really well-handled. In fact, I'd say that its biggest problem was the script. So to see Kosinski's new project was something personal to himself where he was keen to be directly involved in the screenplay, I had high hopes that this could be a marked improvement on his previous film.
On the other hand there's the lead character. I'm not really a particularly big Tom Cruise fan and the biggest problem I have with him is that I get seriously annoyed with him whenever he goes into "smug mode".
Last year I almost gave him a pass on "Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol" because he was essentially playing James Bond-esque figure and so smugness felt somewhat justified. That is, until it reached the final scene and his self-congratulatory smugness went into overdrive. Perhaps the only movie I've REALLY liked starring Tom Cruise is "Minority Report" and even there he still had some smugness to him.
Here we see a much more vulnerable performance from Tom Cruise. He doesn't have the same condescending feel to his performance that I normally expect.(Hopefully he'll be on similar form in Doug Liman's upcoming sci-fi film "All You Need Is Kill".)
The basic gist of "Oblivion" is that Tom Cruise (along with Andrea Riseborough) have been left on Earth to tidy up in the aftermath of an alien invasion that left the Earth essentially dead. There are some remaining aliens on the surface lurking in the shadows and hiding underground, but the rest of the human race have long since left the Earth in order to live on Titan. These two technicians are tasked with protecting and maintaining large devices used to extract resources from the Earth to be taken to Titan. To help them protect these devices, they have the help of full-automated drones which can kill the aliens very quickly. However, if a drone is taken down by alien scavengers, it is the technicians who have to fix them.
I say technicians. In fact, Andrea Riseborough's task is to oversee Tom Cruise's missions from a terminal in their home above the clouds. She is not supposed to go onto the surface and in fact refuses to do so. As such, she is more of an IT person, while Cruise is more of an engineer. While the two of them appear to have a pretty strong relationship, there's tension between them since Tom Cruise feels at home on the Earth while Andrea Riseborough cannot wait to leave.
"Oblivion" takes a variety of elements from sci-fi films you've seen before. There are particularly obvious similarities with Duncan Jones' "Moon" and the Pixar movie "Wall-E". However, one thing that is particularly good about "Oblivion" is its world-building. It has its own unique bizarre set-up, but it sets itself up in a very natural way. All sorts of sci-fi films can be said to have borrowed from one another in terms of themes and visual cues, but what is most important is that the film's specific story is unique enough to stand out. "Oblivion", at its heart, did not feel like a film I had seen before, even while it reminded me of countless other sci-fi classics.
The action scenes are fantastic. Well shot, well paced, and very exciting. Another great aspect is the drones. They feel like a combination of Eve from "Wall-E", sentinels from "The Matrix", Daleks from "Doctor Who", Tie-fighters from "Star Wars", and the drones from "Portal". The list could probably go on even longer, but they really encapsulate some of the best elements from sci-fi. On the one hand there's the look of them. They are very well designed. There's also the way they move and attack. They are quick, imposing, threatening, and yet cold and unfeeling. Early on we see how Tom Cruise quite often has to stand with the drone's guns trained on him waiting and hoping that it will recognise him and move off.
As wonderfully exciting and interesting as this sci-fi film turned out to be. There are a few problems. The biggest problem? Olga Kurylenko, the woman Tom Cruise often sees in dreams. She's not exactly terrible. She's perfectly adequate in the role. But since she is involved in some highly sentimental scenes, those often don't work very well because her performance is not up to scratch. In those scenes Tom Cruise is actually doing the confused, conflicted and emotionally vulnerable act pretty well, but she just feels far too wooden.
It turns out that I've seen Olga Kurylenko before. She was the wild northern woman (with no tongue) in Neil Marshall's "Centurion" and she played a small part as a gangster's girlfriend in Martin McDonagh's "Seven Psychopaths". This part in "Oblivion" is definitely the biggest speaking role I've seen her take on and I'm afraid it doesn't make me keen to see her in more things in the future.
I don't think it helps that her role puts her in direct competition with Andrea Riseborough who is on absolutely top form here. Riseborough played a fairly small part in the "Made In Dagenham" and she was absolutely brilliant as the young Margaret Thatcher in "The Long Walk To Finchley". More recently she has been in a lot of smaller, less high profile features (and unfortunately decided to be in Madonna's movie "W.E." whitewashing royal Nazi-sympathisers), but in Oblivion she plays her part so fantastically that I am really keen to see her in more. Her emotional scenes really work well.
One last problem that needs to be mentioned is that "Oblivion" goes a bit schmaltzy towards the end. Not too ridiculously schmaltzy, but it's an annoying failing in what had been a really exciting and well-paced film. There's a few overly expository lines from Morgan Freeman and a sense that we should be a little more emotionally invested than we actually are at times. Overall though, the story flowed well and kept me interested.
"Oblivion" is a clear sign that the "Tron Legacy" director has a great career ahead of him. Here's hoping that his next project doesn't involve a naff script being foisted on him, because he clearly knows how to tell a good story. Add to that his flair for expressive visuals and exciting action sequences and I'm really keen to see what he does next. A relatively poor performance from one of the lead actors and a little too much pathos towards the end of the film count against this film, but there is also so much here that is absolutely brilliant.
A-