Stylish 'Oblivion' lacks substance
By Jake Coyle |
May 5, 2013, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
EARLY in the sleek sci-fi thriller "Oblivion," Tom Cruise, as a flyboy repairman living a removed, Jetsons-like existence above a deserted Earth, intones his home sickness.
"I can't shake the feeling that despite all that's happened, Earth is still my home," he narrates.
One can't help but chortle and wonder if Cruise is speaking for himself. The chiseled blockbuster star carries so much baggage nowadays that an audience's relationship to him often feels downright alien.
But Cruise, that unrelenting bullet of headlong momentum, is undaunted. He keeps coming back with even bigger films, most of which, despite it all, he reliably propels - even if it's become harder to see Cruise as anything other than himself.
In "Oblivion," the second film from "Tron: Legacy" director Joseph Kosinski, he plays Jack Harper, a patroller of the drone-controlled skies over Earth. From a sparse dock where he lives with his supervisor and girlfriend, Victoria (Andrea Riseborough), Jack makes daily flights in his spacecraft to the Earth's barren surface. "We're the mop-up crew," he says.
He tells us that it's been 60 years since aliens invaded, first knocking out the moon and then leading to a devastating nuclear war. Though humans, he says, won out, they had to abandon the planet's surface (New York is buried up to the Empire State Building's needle), taking refuge on a moon of Saturn. On a desolate Earth, the only beings remaining are hiding bands of Scavengers ("Scavs") that look something like a cross between the Tusken Raiders of "Star Wars" and Milli Vanilli.
Monitoring the land are white, round drones that appear like giant, floating cue balls from afar, but menacing robot killers up close. Occasionally, they need servicing from Harper. He avoids their blasters by authenticating himself, but as they bleep and blork, he cowers anxiously - not entirely certain they're on the same team.
His faith is greater with Victoria, who guides his movements from her computerized desk. Her superior (played with a folksy Southern accent by Melissa Leo) is seen only in scratchy video communiques.
So we are back in a post-apocalyptic world, a place to which movies lately can't help returning, all with various images of wrecked ironic monuments and unpeopled landscapes. We have seen many of the elements of "Oblivion" in countless science fiction tales before. But we've seldom seen them more beautifully rendered.
As the film builds, it plays with familiar sci-fi themes of identity, memory, faith in institutions and human nature.
Analyzing the substance of "Oblivion," which declines - as so many science-fiction films do - as the puzzles are solved, inevitably diminishes the film. But for those viewers who enjoy the simple thrill of handsomely stylized image-making, "Oblivion" is mostly mesmerizing.
"I can't shake the feeling that despite all that's happened, Earth is still my home," he narrates.
One can't help but chortle and wonder if Cruise is speaking for himself. The chiseled blockbuster star carries so much baggage nowadays that an audience's relationship to him often feels downright alien.
But Cruise, that unrelenting bullet of headlong momentum, is undaunted. He keeps coming back with even bigger films, most of which, despite it all, he reliably propels - even if it's become harder to see Cruise as anything other than himself.
In "Oblivion," the second film from "Tron: Legacy" director Joseph Kosinski, he plays Jack Harper, a patroller of the drone-controlled skies over Earth. From a sparse dock where he lives with his supervisor and girlfriend, Victoria (Andrea Riseborough), Jack makes daily flights in his spacecraft to the Earth's barren surface. "We're the mop-up crew," he says.
He tells us that it's been 60 years since aliens invaded, first knocking out the moon and then leading to a devastating nuclear war. Though humans, he says, won out, they had to abandon the planet's surface (New York is buried up to the Empire State Building's needle), taking refuge on a moon of Saturn. On a desolate Earth, the only beings remaining are hiding bands of Scavengers ("Scavs") that look something like a cross between the Tusken Raiders of "Star Wars" and Milli Vanilli.
Monitoring the land are white, round drones that appear like giant, floating cue balls from afar, but menacing robot killers up close. Occasionally, they need servicing from Harper. He avoids their blasters by authenticating himself, but as they bleep and blork, he cowers anxiously - not entirely certain they're on the same team.
His faith is greater with Victoria, who guides his movements from her computerized desk. Her superior (played with a folksy Southern accent by Melissa Leo) is seen only in scratchy video communiques.
So we are back in a post-apocalyptic world, a place to which movies lately can't help returning, all with various images of wrecked ironic monuments and unpeopled landscapes. We have seen many of the elements of "Oblivion" in countless science fiction tales before. But we've seldom seen them more beautifully rendered.
As the film builds, it plays with familiar sci-fi themes of identity, memory, faith in institutions and human nature.
Analyzing the substance of "Oblivion," which declines - as so many science-fiction films do - as the puzzles are solved, inevitably diminishes the film. But for those viewers who enjoy the simple thrill of handsomely stylized image-making, "Oblivion" is mostly mesmerizing.
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