I recently saw the latest Tom Cruise action movie vehicle
Oblivion in theaters. It had to have been made in direct competition with Will Smith's
After Earth for no other reason than to piss in his face, because Will Smith's movie came to my eye well before Oblivion ever did. It was a well-done rush marketing job, that made me wonder how the ad firm saddled with selling this film got it moving so fast. Marketing questions aside, I have noticed something about Tom Cruise: not the fact that he's had his wives picked out for him by his religion (because arranged marriages are as old as human civilization), or how Hollywood goes to the absurd lengths to tell us he's a great actor (despite only having four or five acting settings, of which "determined" is his best and makes him the most money). Tom Cruise has recently played characters with the same name: JACK.
Mr. Cruise started playing Jack in Ridley Scott's
Legend back in 1986, and it was the movie that inspired the
Legend of Zelda (according to Shigeru Miyamoto). He played the titular character in
Jack Reacher, and (although a stretch) played Stacee Jaxx in the film musical
Rock of Ages. Many of his characters are so close in temperament and behavior that they might as well be called JACK also. I expect there to be a day when Mr. Cruise reveals to us all that his real name is not Tom but JACK. With that out of the way, we can talk about our latest Jack, living above the ruins of old Earth--completely transformed and nearly empty of humans.
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| Mile High Club Headquarters? Possibly. |
The humans of the future have fled to Saturn's moon Titan to escape the destruction wrought upon Earth by an invading alien race 60 years earlier--the Scavs. Many Scavs still roam the surface of Earth, and attempt to strike out at large reactors built to convert sea water into fusion energy. Most of thee facilities are guarded by drones, the spherical four-eyed white robots that fly about the skies. These devices are programmed to shoot Scavs. Sometimes they go bad and crash, and that's where Technician 49 (Cruise) comes in. His name is Jack Harper, and he's been having strange dreams--of old Earth, of New York City, and a woman whom he feels a strong connection to...but has never met. It brings him to start remembering things, which his "partner" Victoria Olsen (Andrea Riseborough) strongly discourages due to company regulations and a mandatory memory wipe for security purposes. A red flag should pop up here, but for the grace of suspension of disbelief we soldier on with the story.
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Julia (l) and Jack (r) realize they got to the observation deck
of the Empire State Building by stepping down off the ground.
That is on the 86th floor, so that should give you a clue to
how screwed up the Earth is. |
Not soon after a craft crashes into Zone 49, which is Jack's territory. He feels the need to go in despite warnings from Victoria. He proceeds in to find life pods scattered about the crash site. All of them contain humans from an astronaut mission, and one of them contains the woman who has been haunting Jack's dreams of late: cosmonaut Julia Rusakova (Olga Kurylenko). Eventually, Julia asks to have the black box recorder returned from her ship's landing site and Jack obliges. Unfortunately, the Scavs are watching the landing site and capture both Jack and Julia. A revelation hits them both once they meet the true faces of their captors: humanity is apparently fighting itself, and soldiers of "La Resistance" (aka the "Scavs") are led by Morgan Freeman. And that's not the wildest part.
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| "Dammit, now where did I put that app?" |
Oblivion is an amazing movie to watch. It's got amazing design work from its sterile white house, to the geometric stylings of machinery (Jack's ship and collapsible dirt bike are a marvel, and don't get me started on those beautiful drones). Much of the soundtrack is performed by my new favorite band M83, recalling the funk that is their smash hit "Midnight City". Both of these combined remind me of the visual masterpiece that is
TRON:Legacy, which is funny because Joseph Kosinski directed that film as well as
Oblivion. But there is a huge problem in the film (not counting the fact that Andrea Riseborough's irises never contract, which makes her look like a robot) with the twist at the end of Act II and the movie's denoument.
<<---NOTE: RAMBLING AND SPOILERS AHOY--->>
