When one hears the term "science fiction," images of slam-bang space opera material like Star Wars and its ilk fill the mind's eye. Because the genre slides so easily into the special-effects heavy, blockbuster mold, it's easy for many people to forget that most good-to-great science fiction is founded on ideas and paradoxes. That's where Tom Cruise, director Joseph Kosinski (Tron: Legacy), and Oblivion come in. While the movie contains its fair share of shoot-outs and edge-of-your-seat moments, the narrative is twisty and founded on questions of identity. There are issues with pacing and quite a few holes left unplugged, but this is definitely a more cerebral experience than what the ads promise.
The setup seems familiar enough. The year is 2077, and as protagonist Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) informs us, Earth is a wasteland. We won the war against interplanetary forces but the resulting warfare has left the planet mostly uninhabitable. Survivors have moved on to the planet Titan and established a colony. Jack and Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) are a two-person team tasked with finding and repairing damaged sentry drones. Their missions are complicated by the presence of "scavs," creatures who hang around the remains of the planet and occasionally attack drones. Victoria wants to finish their tour of duty with no complications and go back to enjoying life on Titan. Jack, however, feels an attachment to Earth, as evidenced by the makeshift cabin he has built in a radiation-free zone. His dreams are also dominated by a mysterious young woman (Olga Kurylenko), and Jack's life is turned upside down when he discovers a survivor who looks just like her.
Oblivion freely and liberally borrows from many sources, but where the movie lacks in originality, it makes up for in heart and in mind. Indeed, the question of what makes up a person's identity, whether that something is DNA, memories, compassion, or some combination of the three, is a topic that has obsessed countless writers. The conceit is given its due here with a narrative that contains several genuine surprises. Most of what the characters experience is material we've all seen somewhere before, but Oblivion wouldn't work if we didn't care about the main characters' struggle.
With Tom Cruise's wacky, anti-psychology days long behind him, viewers can finally enjoy watching a movie star in his element (it's also worth noting that at 50, he doesn't look a day over 35). Cruise essays a likable, entirely human character here much the same way he did in Steven Speilberg's brilliant Minority Report. Andrea Riseborough and Olga Kurylenko are beguiling and expressive, albeit in vastly different ways. The former plays a character who is certainly capable of emotion but more often is happy being mechanical in her duties. Jack and Victoria are partners first, but their relationship plays out like a marriage with all of the expected ups and downs. Kurylenko's character has a much more mysterious air about her, and her chemistry with Cruise is an undeniable asset to making the story accessible to more than sci-fi die-hards.
Oblivion isn't a teen-friendly blockbuster. The pace is sluggish early on, but the movie picks up steam not from action sequences-- which are cleanly edited with no shaky-cam in sight-- but from plot developments. Once the battle lines are established, the movie becomes almost conventional; entertaining to be sure, but the momentary rush of shootouts cannot measure up to the fun of trying to figure the narrative out. There are a few gaps in the story as well, but these are really only noticeable after the end credits have rolled and the viewer has time to unwind. Fortunately, for a movie with so much apocalyptic imagery (outdoing even Planet of the Apes with striking shots of a ruined Empire State Building and Pentagon, among others), Oblivion has plenty of positive things to say about the indestructibility of the human spirit.
Rating: *** out of ****
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