Back in 2008, audiences fell in love with a soulful,
big-hearted, little trash-collecting robot named WALL-E who
saved the world and the future of mankind while cleaning up humanity’s
mess. Fast forward a couple of
years and replace the cute little robot with Hollyweird’s favourite, toothy,
couch-jumping Xenu-botherer toting a rifle that’s almost as big as him and, in
essence, you’ve got TRON: Legacy director Joseph
Kosinski’s Oblivion.
60 years after an apocalyptic war with an alien
invasion force known as the Scavs (short for Scavengers), mankind has been
forced to abandon the battle-ravaged Earth, evacuating the remaining population
to a colony on Saturn’s moon Titan, leaving behind only a skeleton crew of
soldiers tasked with repairing and maintaining the security drones that protect
the giant harvester machines strip mining the planet’s natural resources that
are essential for humanity’s survival among the stars.
Drone repairman WALL-E,
sorry, Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) and his devoted colleague
and lover Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) are
nearing the end of their tour of duty on the Earth’s surface and in two weeks
will join the rest of the survivors on the Titan lunar colony. Jack spends his days patrolling the
skies over what was once New York and repairing security drones damaged by the
Scavs still hiding in Eartg’s ruins while Victoria coordinates his searches and
acts as his eyes and ears. But by
night Jack is plagued by dreams, fragmentary memories, of a beautiful woman (Olga
Kurylenko) he’s never met. Or has he?
When the beautiful EVE,
sorry, Julia (Olga Kurylenko) literally falls from the
sky in a damaged spacecraft, Jack finds his very existence thrown into turmoil
as he’s forced to confront some horrific truths and finds the future of
humanity rests on his shoulders.
Slick, glossy and pleasingly straight-faced,
Kosinski’s sci-fi epic (based on his own graphic novel) is actually a rather
sombre, thoughtful, ambiguous piece of work masquerading as a Saturday night,
crowd-pleasing, balls-to-the-wall action flick. Concerned as much with the unreliability of memory, niggling
paranoia and the persistence of love as it is with big guns, dazzling
pyrotechnics and flashy CGI, Oblivion
borrows liberally from some of the most iconic science fiction films of the
last 50 years (Planet Of The Apes, The Matrix, Silent Running, Moon, 2001),
drawing major inspiration (and stealing chunks of plot) from WALL-E, Philip
K. Dick’s brilliant short story Second Variety
(filmed as the little-seen gem Screamers) and Alastair
Reynolds’ Revelation Space novels yet still somehow managing in the
process to rise above its diverse influences to deliver a bold, refreshing (if
not exactly fresh) vision of our post-apocalyptic future with, for once, a
truly alien threat.
As Oblivion’s
everyman protagonist, Cruise is decent if a little miscast, delivering a nicely
understated performance which never quite convinces as your regular working
stiff. No matter how much he plays
down his Messianic craziness, the Cruiser is always playing the hero even long
before his Jack realises he is one.
Why else would he ride around Kosinski’s stunning ruined vistas on a
motorbike when he could zip around in his cool insect-like spaceship other than
the fact the Cruiser likes to race motorbikes? Far better casting as Jack would have been Game Of
Thrones star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau who’s
relegated to the secondary role of grizzled resistance fighter. Though Cruise convinces as a man who,
when faced with the choice between two seemingly idyllic heterosexual
relationships, would rather go to war with a malevolent alien machine
intelligence. The film also
features a fantastic triumvirate of female performances with the exquisite Olga
Kurylenko definitely the kind of woman who’d make anyone, not just Tom,
question their beliefs if she fell out of the sky on top of them while Melissa
Leo is creepily cheery as Jack and Victoria’s ruthless space-bound boss. The finest performance in the film
though comes from Andrea Riseborough who manages the feat of being twitchy,
sexy, poised, vulnerable and ambiguous in every scene she steals.
Without wishing to reveal any of the film’s major
twists (c’mon, you know from the trailer Morgan Freeman is
basically phoning it in as the film’s Morpheus!), Oblivion is a
little obvious, offering few surprises, and it’s never quite as clever or
stirring as it wants to be but it is a jaw-droppingly gorgeous, exciting piece
of pure entertainment that may just end up being the first iconic sci-fi movie
of the next decade.
David Watson
Directed by:
Written by:
Produced by:
Starring:
Tom Cruise, Olga Kurylenko, Andrea Riseborough, Morgan Freeman, Nikolaj
Coster-Waldau and Lindsay Clift
Genres:
Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi
Language:
English
Runtime:
2 hours 6 minutes
Certificate:
12a
UK Release Date:
Wednesday 10th April 2013
Rating:
4/5
No comments:
Post a Comment