Movie Review - Oblivion (2013)

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.

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.

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.

"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--->>

Jack is told to never go past the borders of Zone 49, because the radiation is so high from alien bombardments it would cook him in his suit.  Morgan Freeman tells him that all he needs to know can be found outside the borders of Zone 49, in the Radiation Zone.  Perchance, a drone goes down in the Radiation Zone and Jack eventually has to check it out.  When he gets there, he finds the drone--and a CLONE of himself getting out of a ship with the number "52" on it.  It is at this point we know (a) Jack is a clone and (b) we can refer to our Jack as "Jack-49" and clone Jack as "Jack-52".  This will come in handy later.

Andrea Riseborough as Victoria Olsen,
the most interesting character in the movie.

We soon learn there is another zone--Zone 52--replete with a headquarters, a ship, a Jack, and a Victoria.  Let's call her "Victoria-52", compared to Jack-49's Victoria ("Victoria-49").  As the movie goes forward, we find that Victoria-49 dies and towards the end Jack-49 dies (while saving the world from the aliens AGAIN).  Which leaves Jack-52 and Victoria-52, but not really.  You see, if Zone 49 and 52 were two of several zones operating, then that means there are clones of Victoria and Jack for each zone, from zones 1 through 48, 50, 51, and proceeding from 53 onward.  The zones couldn't be so big that one team covers thousands of miles in a single vector and zone 49 is represented as a horizontal rectangle over New York City, so that could mean thousands of clone teams (each with one Jack and one Victoria) monitoring zone after zone across the globe.  Despite the pairing, this ignores what was actually bred into the clones.
All the clones of Jack are assumed to be bred in exactly the same way--same love of sports, a soft spot for dogs, a curious streak, and an obsession with the mysterious woman in his dreams.  In watching the movie to the end, one can infer that the way Victoria looks at Jack (especially in the Earth spacecraft) and the way she behaves when confronted with a choice of deviating from a set pattern that each clone of her was bred to be stubborn and patient, yet obedient to the point of obliviousness and incredibly jealous of any other person in Jack's life.  This brings us to the consequences of  both team members of Zone 49 dying, the aliens defeated and Jack-52 picks up with the cosmonaut Julia where Jack-49 (the one that saved Julia) left off: what happens to the other maintenance teams supported by the now-defeated aliens?   More importantly, what happens to Victoria-52?

My concern for Victoria-52 is mainly due to Andrea Riseborough's excellent performance as Victoria Olsen, the original astronaut from which she was cloned.  It was made clear through her body language that Victoria may have been a former lover/unrequited of Jack, but was passed over for Julia.  When they were kidnapped by the aliens and cloned, I wouldn't be surprised that whatever very strong memories were present in their minds at the time were imprinted in each clone--even after the memory wipe: Jack thinking of Julia, and Victoria thinking of Jack.  To illustrate this, Victoria grabbed Jack's hand and said his name: the last sound on the ship's flight recorder.  It's not a stretch to think that the alien entity could have killed them both, but Victoria may have negotiated a compromise with the alien: unflinching obedience on her part and the entire Earth...for Jack and a kind of immortality.  Hence the strong connection all Victoria clones have to their assigned Jack clones, because they may have been under the impression that to disobey the aliens would mean losing Jack.  And so mankind nearly went extinct for the want of itself
You may think this is a bit far-fetched, but remember that Liz Sherman damned humanity and possibly her own soul to save the dying Hellboy from the Angel of Death in Hellboy II: the Golden Army, knowing what she was doing when she did.  A parallel could be found here, and I daresay parallels could be found in the book of Genesis and Jewish mythology.

I'm gonna put out there that the aliens in this movie are a form of Satan, and that Jack and Julia are a futuristic Adam and Eve (despite the other surviving humans).  In Jewish mythology, Adam had a previous  help-mate named Lilith.  With almost every other alien supported team surviving after the fall of the aliens with each member intact, Victoria-52 is the only aberration of these groups now that the alien ship with all the clones is now destroyed (assuming all teams had a full compliment and survive without incident prior to the fall).  She's not getting another Jack-52. She is alone in the wilderness, in her mountain citadel #52.  With all the advanced technology (some of it with independent power sources), she might cause problems for the surviving humans in the future.

"Forget about us, Sonny Jim?"
(l-r) Morgan Freeman, Zoe Bell, Nickolaj Coster-Waldau.

I have to stop this review because if I keep going, I'll never finish because if I have to ask if the clones can reproduce or if they're actually human and what that would mean for the future of humanity as the survivors know it, I'll just keep going and I'll never be able to remind you that Morgan Freeman, stunt woman Zoe Bell, and the dude from HBO's Game of Thrones (Nickolaj Coster-Waldau) are in this movie.

Due to the amount of fridge logic invoked and buoyed by its visuals, Oblivion gets a 6 out of 10.