OBLIVION Is Visually Stunning but Superficial and Unoriginal

Oblivion was a movie I’d been looking forward to as I’m a huge (dystopian) sci-fi fan. Unfortunately, it was quite a disappointment. Rarely have I seen a movie as unoriginal as this one.

In Oblivion, Earth was destroyed in a war with the “Scavs”, aliens that came, destroyed the moon (the consequences of that alone caused great ruin) and then invaded the planet. They won the war, but the Scavs still roam the planet and humankind had to leave – moving to Titan, a moon of Saturn. We follow drone technician Jack Harper, who is one of the few still left on Earth, together with his partner/communications manager. One day, a spaceship breaks into the atmosphere and crashes. Against orders, Jack goes to check out the crash site and finds something he didn’t expect, leading him to doubt his circumstances.

The Good

Oblivion is visually stunning, without a doubt. The effects are (mostly) great (e.g. the tech, ships, alien spaceship, etc.), and the shots presented us with great views of a destroyed (but still beautiful) Earth and what’s left of New York in particular. All in all, the cinematography was excellent: a lot of attention was paid to the every detail of the filming of the movie –director of photography Claudio Miranda, who won an Academy Award for equally visually stunning Life of Pi (2012), was in full control.

It does seem like Miranda was leading this effort – he worked with (inexperienced) director Joseph Kosinski before, for TRON: Legacy (2010) – another movie that was awesome in the cinematography department, but didn’t have such a great story.

So that’s what you get: a movie that is very pretty to watch, but lacks any kind of content, which I’ll dig into deeper next.

The Bad

Man, Oblivion’s unoriginality was… unique. Let me just list the amount of movies (and games!) this movie was so blatantly inspired by. Warning, this contains some major spoilers.

• Total Recall (1990): lost memories recovered (and the hero saves the day)
• Mad Max: the Scavs vs the bandits of The Road Warrior & Beyond Thunderdome in their styling and tactics
• Moon (2009): the (fooling of) the clones, with their only purpose being maintenance
• The Matrix (1999): storage of the clones in alien ship vs storing of humans in the harvest fields of The Matrix
• THX-1138 (1971): Sally kept asking “are you an effective team?” which reminded me a lot of the godlike figure in THX-1138: “Be efficient, be happy”
• Portal games (1 and 2): Oblivion‘s drones vs the turrets in the Portal games (their sounds and the way their guns popped out of the sides and they scanned their targets before shooting). Sally vs GLaDOS: Sally’s voice like GLaDOS’, was distorted to sound machinelike, and Sally looked like a machine with one all-seeing eye, like GLaDOS.

On to Tom Cruise. He was in need of a lot more direction than he got from Kosinski.  Cruise was a good choice for the lead in that he’s an experienced sci-fi actor, but if he’s not told to do anything different, he’ll just give you the Tom Cruise sci-fi character we’ve already seen so many times now.

The similarities between this character and the one in Minority Report (2002) are astonishing as well. In both movies Cruise is chasing some sort of mental image: a memory in Oblivion, peek into the future in Minority Report. There was even a moment where his eyes were covered with a rag and the similarity to the scene where John Anderton gets his eye surgery in Minority Report is just too much. Look at the poster of Minority Report and the shot in Oblivion and tell me that’s a coincidence:

I wouldn’t even blame Tom Cruise – he’s not that much of an inventive actor – he just does what he knows. I think in this case it was just Kosinki’s lacking experience as a director to take Cruise’s performance to the next level.

Jack Harper the character was honestly not one I cared a lot about. He was, to me, uninteresting and predictable. What annoyed me in particular: his one-liners towards the bobbing head Elvis-like figurine in his plane, which were far from funny and even ridiculous. To me it seemed like they were the creators’ attempts to make Jack more relatable and human, but as I see it, it only made him look stupid.

I didn’t care at all about any of the characters in fact – all of them were as plain as can be, with barely any back story whatsoever, and I honestly didn’t care less if they survived or not. Another eyesore to me were the women: they fell all over each other to get Jack’s attention and love, even Sally, at the first chance she got. Sigh.

I found the amount of back story lacking in general: I was desperately craving some more background info on the alien species, but we didn’t get any. Their ultimate reason for attacking Earth, we’re told, is for its energy, but what for? To me it made no sense. Surely, they could have found a planet (or way) that would generate energy a lot more efficiently than what they were doing on Earth.

And Finally

All in all I’d say Kosinki was a bit too engrossed with his own idea (the movie was based on his own graphic novel), which essentially is just a mashup of every sci-fi story he ever came across. It would have done a lot better with more back story and content, more likeable characters, better direction of the actors and a less predictable plot.

Although it was visually very pleasing and most people won’t be as bothered with its unoriginality because they simply don’t know the movies it refers to and they’re too blinded by the visuals, if you do enjoy science fiction and you’ve seen (most of) the movies I mentioned above, you’ll probably just be annoyed by Oblivion. I wish there was more to Oblivion than meets the eye; it would have been great if it dug deeper into the philosophical material that it superficially presents. A shame, really, it could have been pretty awesome.

If you’ve seen Oblivion and the other movies I mentioned, did you recognize the similarities as well?

What do you think of Tom Cruise as a sci-fi actor, is it getting old?