Director Joseph Kosinski’s debut feature, 2010’s TRON: Legacy, was a dazzling marriage of sight and sound that made for a unique and immersive filmgoing experience—for about the first half hour of its runtime. Then you got used to the visual style and the Daft Punk soundtrack, and what you were left with was a hollow story with paper thin characters that failed to engage past the initial wow factor. His new film, Oblivion, is much the same. The film’s music, provided by M83, is booming and evocative, the design and effects work that bring the future version of Earth that Kosinski has conceptualized to life are interesting and impressive... and then you get to the story.
Oblivion is the kind of movie that’s hard to write about, because past the initial setup it mostly hangs its hat on plot twists and reveals, and one doesn’t want to give up any of its secrets. What is safe to say is that the film stars Tom Cruise and Andrea Riseborough as the crew of a maintenance station that’s one of the few things left behind on an Earth that has been decimated by a costly war with the alien “Scavs.” The plan is to move humanity off to one of the moons of Saturn or some such, and our protagonists’ job is to monitor and maintain the drones that are stripping the Earth of what’s left of the vital resources we need. They’ve been mind wiped, the only contact they have with anyone outside of each other is one off-planet supervisor (Melissa Leo) who they communicate with through a little monitor, and generally there’s the looming feeling that something shady is definitely going on. After a mysterious spaceship crashes in a nearby sector, a chain of events is set off that eventually brings some hard truths to light.
The overall feeling one experiences coming out of Oblivion is that it was perfectly adequate, but still somehow unsatisfying. It looks good, the action scenes are serviceable, and it delivers most of what you’d expect from a big sci-fi blockbuster, but—much like TRON: Legacy—there’s still something about the overall product that feels completely hollow. One of the big reasons we go to the sci-fi genre is to experience new ideas, and Oblivion doesn’t seem to have a single one. Instead, it’s just a patchwork of all the big ideas from the most influential sci-fi films of the past 30 years, so instead of being shocking, the twist-filled plot mostly plays as being nothing more than constant retread. You can make a game of picking through the movie and naming what famous film each plot point, character motivation, or futuristic gizmo came from. It’s like experiencing movie deja vu.
The cast is generally good, with Tom Cruise doing that spectacular but still relatable movie hero thing that he’s perfected at this point, and Riseborough playing an ice queen character by hiding just enough conflict and insecurity in her performance to keep us relating to her, but the mind-wiped, blank slate nature of the characters keeps them from becoming anyone we can truly become interested or invested in. You would think that as the movie went on we would learn more about them and that they would become more three-dimensional, but somehow Oblivion manages to make choices that, if anything, makes them degenerate more into paper thin embodiments of one or two character traits as you go along. There are other performances here, from people like Morgan Freeman, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, and Olga Kurylenko, but to say too much about what they do would give away too many of the film’s secrets, as well-tread and easily predicted as those secrets are. Plus, none are given enough screen time to really make any difference as to the overall quality of the movie. This is the Tom Cruise show, all the way through.
The thinness doesn’t just stop at the characters either, it permeates most of Kosinski’s script. Probably it’s not a very good idea to try to pick apart crazy sci-fi concepts like this in order to look for plot holes and the like, but one can’t help but notice that nothing that’s going on in this movie makes all that much sense. Kosinski introduces us to a new world, and thoroughly explains it to us through probably too much exposition, but he’s never really able to justify why this world exists or what the architects of it are getting out of doing things this way. The plot here looks like little more than a patchwork of sticks and glue used to hold all of the design concepts and genre homage he wanted to include in the film together. It almost makes for a complete whole, and it’s engaging enough while you’re watching it, but it’s not the sort of thing that’s going to hold up or stick with you over time. Catch this one on home video maybe, when it becomes rentable, but there’s no need to seek it out in the theater. Chances are you’ve already seen it enough times already.
