'Oblivion'

Forgetting Other Movies Exist

Spoiler alert.

No, really. In this one I'll definitely have to spoil it for you so if you hate spoilers, don't read on.

Okay now? Good.

You've seen this movie in many guises before. It's just been jumbled up and put together from parts of other films. It's a film that almost looks authentic and original and it's not. It's a clone just like the main character.

What's Good About It

Some marvelous cinematography and design. it's a rare film that takes you to a place you've never seen and show you a light that is new and refreshing. This film has it in spades.

The UTCC (The Ubiquitous Tom Cruise Character) isn't too annoying in this film, unlike say, in 'Jack Reacher'. In this one, he is playing a character imaginatively named Jack Harper. That should've been the give away that the main character was going to be some kind of clone. Perhaps it's even a kind of meta-textual irony, as in: "Hey look, all his characters are the same!"

It's hard to say because in most part the film takes itself pretty seriously. In most instances, that would be good except...

What's Bad About It

... this film is like an identikit science fiction movie. Post-Apocalyptic settings don't come more hard and fast than this movie. The New York City in ruins harks back to both 'Planet of the Apes' and 'A.I.'. The helicopter harks back to the sky-hover vehicles in 'Minority Report' and hey, Tom cruise was in that one too. There are scavengers on the Post Apocalyptic landscape, an they're like something right out of 'Mad Max'. Then these drones come around and attack people - and they're unrelenting like the robots in 'I Robot'. The Robot Drones have a POV shot, and lo and behold it's like the Termo-vision from 'The Terminator'. Weirder still, for a machine designed by aliens, it's conveniently  got English text in the read outs. So Tom Cruise's Jack sets off to find one of these drones and finds himself in the library having a shoot out with the post-Apocalyptic scavengers in a defunct library in a sequence that looks like 'I Am Legend' and look, he gets his foot trapped and dragged across the floor by a trap pulley, just as Will Smith was catching monsters... Eventually Jack is talking to a wise old black guy who fills him in on the exposition and of course you'd swear that could've been  Morpheus from 'The Matrix', but it's not, it's Morgan Freeman playing a version of a guy that could have been Morpheus. Then Jack meets his clone self and realises he is one of many clones all kept apart artificially, but sharing memory fragments, just like Sam Rockwell in 'Moon'. The memory fragments feature the moment he proposed to his wife on the observation deck of the Empire State Building and of course this harks back to 'Sleepless In Seattle' which took its cue from 'An Affair to Remember'. Finally, he heads up to confront the alien craft in the sky and is taken in by the big mothership, like 'Independence Day' there, he sees banks upon banks of himself as clones - a bit like Buzz Lightyear does in 'Toy Story'. Eventually, he comes to a platform, and confronts an alien AI, that speaks through a red singular eye (Machine Messiah!). the red singular eye is suspiciously like the red light of HAL 9000 from '2001: A Space Odyssey'. Then, Jack blows them all up by flicking a switch, much like Bruce Willis does in the climactic moment of Armageddon'.

I'm sure I missed a few more. And it all could have been a wonderful film if you didn't know any of these other good films.

What's Interesting About It

If it weren't for all the bad bits mentioned above, it's probably an okay movie.  You sort of wonder about the producers who let a director do this sort of thing. Talk about not having any original ideas, yet still managing to make a movie that went to market. It's a bit like if I made a car out of all these different bits of cars from different makes and then sold it as something original.

The Post-Apocalypse Fantasy

This sub-genre has been growing for a while. Maybe it started with 'On the Beach' where everywhere but Australia gets nuked and people quietly await their radiation death in Australia. Somehow I doubt it would go that way if it ever happened that Australia was the last outpost of civilisation remaining. It would be more like Satyricon or the last days of Rome. 'Planet of the Apes' and 'Mad Max' both couch their stories as after our civilisation has fallen. As the genre grows it seems we really like this idea that people would band together in paramilitary enclaves. So much so the survivalist fantasies seem to meld into one vision of huddled masses living in industrial buildings.

Somehow I don't think that's how it would go. We'd sooner become each man for himself and behave like the kids in 'Lord of the Flies' than turn into bands of resistance we see so often in these movies. It's almost worth doing a 'Lord of the Flies' for adults. I guess 'Lost' was meant to be that, but went off into a weird direction and lived up to its name.

All these films ignore just how much our lives are sitting atop the giant edifice of knowledge and structure of society built up over thousands of years. The survivalists are hoping that suddenly these restrictive laws and governments would suddenly vanish and leave behind these weird kinds of utopias but it won't happen that way for the simple reason that even the rudimentary of our lives depends on resources we cannot mine unless we have the great apparatus of civilisation. The more they make these films, the more hokey and silly the vision of a post-apocalypse becomes. When civilisation ends, it will be just that - the end of the world of homo sapiens. There won't be these heroic adventures.  Just death.