Film Review: Oblivion

Oblivion is a movie that sits somewhere in the middle. It’s neither simply good nor bad, and contains moments of unbridled spectacle that audiences come to see in huge sci-fi epics but also contains some bafflingly convoluted choices that undermine the film’s complete potential.

It’s the story of Jack Harper (Tom Cruise, in a role that plays out like an older version of his Maverick character from Top Gun), a drone mechanic on a post-apocalyptic Earth who is one of the last humans stationed on the ruined planet following a failed alien invasion 60 years earlier. In a last ditch effort the invaders wiped out parts of the Moon causing crippling earthquakes and floods, leaving the planet uninhabitable. Harper and his communications officer Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) are nearing the end of their mission to fend off alien insurgents as well as extract the planet’s remaining resources so they can meet up with the remnants of Earth on Saturn’s moon Titan.  When a mysterious capsule crash lands on the planet containing a woman (Olga Kurylenko) Jack’s been dreaming about in flashbacks from before the war, it starts Jack down a mysterious path that has consequences for the entire human race.

The problem with Oblivion is that it sounds original – it was first developed as a pet project by director Joseph Kosinski as a graphic novel – but once you sit down to experience the film it plays out as a clever patchwork of classic sci-fi influences. Signifiers abound with everything from Star Wars, 2001, Alien, The Matrix Trilogy, Planet of the Apes, Moon, The Twilight Zone, and even Pixar’s Wall-E being obvious reference points.

There’s a TS Eliot quote that says “Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal, bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better.” If you do a little substitution of “filmmakers” for “poets,” you can get to the idea of what I’m talking about here. It’s obvious that Kosinski was inspired by these films because the allusions themselves are veiled within the layers of the overall story, and as I said before it isn’t plainly bad so it doesn’t deface anything and it isn’t outright good so it doesn’t make it into something better. What we’re left with then is maturity vs. immaturity.

Kosinski is still a new filmmaker, with Oblivion being his second film after the much-debated Tron: Legacy as his feature debut. He’s the type of guy who has many interesting and brainy ideas to bring these complex sci-fi worlds to the screen – the shear design work of the expansive neon grid in Tron: Legacy and the ominously sterile “Apple Store” tech in Oblivion are examples that can attest to that – but it feels like in his first two films he’s given too much to carry at one time without a proper filter to whittle those ideas down to the iconic status his stories are working towards. He’s therefore not a mature filmmaker who blatantly steals, but rather an immature filmmaker who imitates.

The imitation here is inventive and certainly plays true to the story in an entertaining way, but the convoluted plot points that hinge on certain spoilers that can’t be named here makes the film crumble under the weight of those mysteries. The film is genuinely thrilling at times as it keeps you guessing, and it looks absolutely gorgeous, but the minor payoffs on the way to the grand finale slows the momentum that kept you on your seat for the first two acts.

There are moments of greatness but there are moments of nonsense, and yet Jospeh Kosinski remains a filmmaker to watch because the talent to make a true sci-fi classic is definitely there. He’s a filmmaker who isn’t intimidated by studios who give him big budgets or movie stars who have big egos, and he definitely knows how to entertain. In order to make that truly lasting film, he needs to somehow balance his influences out and provide just a little more substance than style.