Review #8: Oblivion
If aliens needed Earth’s oceans to charge their batteries…
“I can’t shake the feeling that Earth, in spite of all that’s happened, Earth is still my home.” -Jack Harper
Synopsis
In a future where Tom Cruise’s hair never goes astray, what’s left of humanity prepares to move to Saturn’s moon Titan in the wake of a devastating war with an alien race 60 years ago, which has rendered the Earth uninhabitable. Though the war was won, rogue “Scavs” still roam the planet threatening to sabotage the massive fusion power plants which are sucking water out of the ocean to power the future human colony. Jack Harper and some English chick are assigned by their mothership, the Tet, to a floating Apple store to oversee the operation of these power plants, but Jack starts having dreams about a girl in a pre-war past life. One day on a routine mission, he witnesses a craft burn through the atmosphere and crash nearby. Upon investigation, he finds a survivor in a stasis pod and realizes she is the girl from his dreams. He awakens her, but before they can get back to Jack’s ship, they are captured by Scavs who turn out to be *GASP* humans!
The Scavs, lead by Morgan Freeman and his beautiful voice, explain that the war with the aliens was lost 60 years ago, and they are what is left of humanity. Furthermore, the Tet is actually an alien ship using Earth’s oceans to power her interstellar batteries, and Jack has somehow been rewired to serve them. The English chick starts to suspect Jack, so she reports him to the Tet when he arrives back with dream-girl. Drones kill the English girl, and then chase Jack and said girl out beyond the “radiation zone”, which turns out to have no radiation at all, but was instead a separate zone of operation with an identical Jack clone overseeing more fusion plants. Eventually, Jack learns that he and his English partner were captured by the aliens 60 years ago and cloned to serve their purposes, and that dream-girl was his wife. All of this convinces Jack that the Scavs he met were truthful, and he agrees to help them take down the Tet. After some crazy sci-fi fights with more drones, Jack and Freeman load up a bunch of stolen drone fuel cells into Jack’s ship and fly it into the Tet to blow it up. BOOM.
Mood/Setting
Oblivion projects some intriguing moods while struggling with its own, somewhat iffy plot. Jack and his English partner’s communication with the Tet, for example, is always scratchy and pixelated, relaying a sinister enough vibe to make the audience feel just a little uncomfortable about their seemingly perfect life on the platform. This feeling is amplified by the Tet’s resemblance of a gigantic eye when it rises over the horizon, symbolically watching over their every move. Though the overall plot is more cliche, the setting they use for it is actually fairly unique. Oblivion drops its audience into a dystopian future that feels post-apocalyptic, but in reality, the apocalypse is still underway. This novel situation would carry more weight if the rest of the film’s setting weren’t so forgettable. All of the weapons, ship designs, and action scenes feel like they were ripped from other, greater sci-fi movies, despite still forming some enjoyable instances.
Plot Review
Oblivion feels like it was written by that kid in physics who paid just enough attention to pass the class, but spent their free time trying to find out how many crayons they could fit up their nose while drunk. The film has plenty of fun asking questions, but forgets to answer the ones that its audience actually wants to know. Let’s assume that an interstellar alien race really did need water to power fusion drives for their mothership… Why not go to one of the four other bodies in our Solar System which have more water than Earth does? Okay, maybe it needed to be liquid water… Why wouldn’t they just use their vast interstellar alien power to wipe humanity out completely, and then just take it? Of course, they couldn’t have done this under the watchful eye of the US Space Force! Seriously, slap a space cadet badge on some Texans, hand them laser guns, and tell them the Tet is Communism. Those aliens would be headed back to Betelgeuse in less time than it takes Tom Cruise to fix his hair between scenes. But I digress, lots of plot holes.
Are we supposed to believe that this group of Scavs are the only humans left on Earth? Or are they just the only ones retaliating? Because if these Jack clones are this susceptible to corruption, one would think that an uprising like this would have occurred before somewhere else on Earth with the other Jack clones. I suppose this could be the rare story of the one clone that became aware of his past, but that again assumes that Scavs must be abundant around the world for them to find him. By the way, anyone else notice that Morgan Freeman’s outfit looks like it was stolen right from the set of Mad Max?! Only instead of trying to kill a bunch of people, Freeman is trying to get Jack to convert like some sort of psychedelic Mormon doorknocker. Let’s be honest though, if Morgan Freeman showed up at your door and told you to convert to literally anything, you would.
Despite its faulty plot, there actually is a lot to appreciate about Oblivion. The film does a great job at showing us a ruined Earth from 60 years ago, and at feeding its audience the mystery that surrounds the Tet and Jack’s mission. The action scenes are also executed pretty well, except for the fact that drone laser hits on people are extremely unaesthetic. I know they were trying to keep the movie rated PG-13, but couldn’t they just have worked creative camera angles to avoid gore instead of having people literally turn into charcoal bits?
When the film dropped the bombshell about the Tet-threat, I’ll admit that I was taken by surprise. But then, the film tries to drop all these other twists in an attempt to wow its viewers, and frankly, it’s overkill. The girl was Jack’s wife before the war, the English chick was his coworker, the artifacts he’s been collecting are all from his past, the radiation zone has no radiation, the whole alien operation is lead by clones of him… Each passing plot twist makes the watcher more and more weary and uninterested in the original bombshell, and the plot as a whole. Like riding Space Mountain after eating extra spicy buffalo wings, the movie should have just unloaded all of it’s inside contents at once.
Their plan to blow up the Tet also raises several more questions. Why wouldn’t the Tet just destroy Jack’s ship if it suspected anything about Jack’s intentions? The inside of the Tet showed thousands of Jack clones, so by all means, he should be expendable to them. I also feel like if I were an advanced alien race, I would want to install “off switches” in any human clones I made to kill any that showed signs of retaliation. Regardless of my useless bantering, the ending explosion scene is pretty cool, and seeing Julia (wife) years later with their kid was a respectable way to put a bow on it. Finally, if Tom Cruise’s hair always fixes itself, and the Tet had thousands of clones of Tom Cruise, couldn’t they have just generated power by forcing the clones to mess each other’s hair up forever, and then collect the kinetic energy generated by it fixing itself?
Conclusion
Though deeply flawed, Oblivion delivers a unique enough sci-fi plot to watch through to the explosive end. The themes are somewhat cerebral, the action sequences are aptly executed, and the cinematography is at par. However, if you go into this movie expecting a mind-bending, thrilling, aesthetic masterpiece, you will likely emerge a bit disappointed on the other side.
