Film Friday: Oblivion (2013)

Oblivion was considered a bomb, though it did well overseas. It was also derided by the critics as a knock-off and kind of thin. So I had pretty low expectations going in. I’m not sure how much having low expectations helped, but I actually found that I enjoyed Oblivion, though it was very slow. That said, however, I have no desire to see it again, and therein lies the problem.

I’m going to go light on the spoilers because what makes this film work is the steady stream of discovery. Without that, this film is pretty worthless. So here’s the plot in a nutshell: Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) is Tech 49. He lives in a house in the clouds with Victoria, his partner and lover, and his job is to protect and maintain drones which protect these massive machines that are sucking up the oceans and turning them into electric power, which gets shipped to the humans living on Titan.

The reason humanity has moved to Titan is because of a war. The year is 2077 and 60 years prior an alien race known as the Scavengers attacked the Earth to steal our resources. When they invaded, they initially destroyed the moon, causing massive earthquakes which up-ended the Earth, destroyed our cities, and nearly wiped out humanity. Then their troops landed. The humans were losing so they fired off nuclear weapons. Those weapons made most of the planet uninhabitable, but they succeeded in winning the war. Jack’s job now is to protect the machines producing the power from the last few Scavengers left.

The story begins with Jack fixing a drone and giving us a long series of visuals about the destroyed Earth. We are shown various destroyed landmarks, like the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty and the Pentagon. We also see that the scavengers are no match for Jack, and certainly not for the drones.

At this point, you can probably already tell where this is going, and that is the problem. Had this film been made in the 1950s, Oblivion would be considered pure genius. People would talk about it in the same way they talk about 2001. But it wasn’t. It was made last year. And since the 1950s, this premise has been done to death, and then some. In fact, I think every other episode of The Outer Limits in the 1990s started this way. And from those episodes, we know that things are not as they seem. Indeed, we know that Tom is really working for the bad guys and just doesn’t know it.

Is that what’s happening here? Well, yeah, but there are several more interesting twists I won’t tell you about, like who/what Tom really is and what role Tom had in the initial invasion of Earth. Again, neither point is original, but their inclusion feels surprising enough here that it’s worth not revealing in this review.

As films go, this one wasn’t dull, despite the very thin story. The film is beautiful, even if we are talking about yet another apocalyptic film. There is a lot of tension in the film, coming primarily from the use of space. Specifically, there is a constant sense that Tom lacks the ability to monitor the world around him to ensure that he’s safe whenever he steps out of his helicopter spaceship (a bubble ship). This was very well done to keep you anxious throughout.

The film is good too at dripping out a continuous stream of clues. (Skip this paragraph if you want to avoid spoilers.) For example, we get Tom having a dream involving a woman. That’s the first sign that something is amiss with Tom, especially as we are told they had their memories wiped for some reason. Who is this woman and what does she mean? And why wipe memories at all? Doesn't that seem suspicious? Interestingly, this dream also shows Tom in New York City before the invasion, which shouldn’t be possible if the invasion happened 60 years ago. So something is already wrong with the story. Then there’s the radiation zones. Radiation doesn’t sit, it travels. So the idea of radiation borders doesn’t make a lot of sense and should tell us that something is amiss with the radiation zones that are meant to keep Tom out of other areas. Then you have the drones, which act like they want to kill Tom. This foreshadows the idea that the drones are hostile to humans... which makes no sense if they were built by humans. Then Tom saves the woman who is his real wife, but again, how could they be the same age if she had been asleep for 60 years.

These clues and the way Morgan Freeman tells Tom to figure things out for himself rather than just telling him what he needs to know keep the movie interesting and keep you excited about solving the puzzle of what is going on. That is more than enough to make this a worthwhile film to watch. It is interesting.

But it also makes the movie worthless in terms of re-watchability. This movie depends entirely on the mystery it builds and the suspense in each individual scene... will they get him or not. And once you know the answer to the mystery and once you know when he’s in danger and when he isn’t, there just isn’t anything left in the film that you want to watch a second time. The story doesn’t resolve itself in a rousing way to make you stand up and cheer, so you can’t revisit the feeling of triumph. The romance is pro-forma and cold, so you can’t fall in love all over again. The film isn’t funny, the dialog isn’t beautiful or surprising. The action scenes aren’t spectacular. The world they create is sparse and uninteresting and not the sort of world that sparks fantasies. All you have is a mystery, a mystery that vanishes once you’ve seen the film.

For a movie like this to stand out after the flood of poor science fiction that pillaged ideas like this and made them all feel derivative, the film needs a second act. It needs Tom to stumble upon a second world to explore, where the story could become more than “wasteland Tom learns the truth.” Or it needs some strong emotional story in which Tom struggles against himself to realize what it means to be human and to do the right thing against real odds – face the impossible choice. Even revealing the past through some sort of flashback story would have helped. It needed something.

So here’s the thing. Nothing about this film is original. In fact, it’s horribly derivative. Nothing about this film is deep or memorable. The film isn’t an enjoyable story that you want to see again, it doesn’t present a world that will pull you in and make you want more, and it doesn’t have characters that you care about. But what it does have going for it is an interesting mystery about what exactly happened. In that regard, I definitely recommend seeing this film... just don’t buy the disc.