Oblivion
Directed by Joseph Kosinski
Three and One Half Stars
Science fiction is less a genre than a society, and to join, one must pay tribute to the council of elders. More than any other genre, fans of science fiction scour their films for references to the titans of its heritage. The allusions are often scattered throughout as deliberate, coy visual cues, not unlike a word search. It is customary, for example, to represent any malicious artificial intelligence with the ominous red eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" ("Red Planet", "Moon", "WALL-E"...). But that's just one example, and one of many that Joseph Kosinski conjures in the clever and striking "Oblivion", a science-fiction blockbuster in the classic sense, placing lavish visuals and exciting action in the service of simple and elegant political ideas.
The setup is explained poetically. The year is 2077, and 60 years ago the earth was invaded by an alien race known only as the Scavengers (or Scavs). They blew up the moon, which is shown later as a great mass of debris in the sky, beginning to band itself into a ring of dust and stone in Earth's orbit. The loss of the moon had catastrophic effects on the planet's tides and tectonics, destroying our environment. Mankind had no choice but to resort to the nukes, winning the war against the Scavs but rendering the whole of the planet virtually uninhabitable. The human population was evacuated to a large, pyramidal space station called the Tet and prepared to relocate to Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. Massive machines were built to extract what was left of our usable resources, chiefly our oceans.
Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) and Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) are scouts assigned to maintain the machines, chiefly the drones protecting them from straggler Scavs that try to sabotage the extraction efforts. They live on a suspended base that more closely resembles an extravagant condo, with contemporary furniture and a glass-bottomed pool. By day, Jack patrols the region in an oblique, pod-like mini-jet while Victoria mans the controls, scanning for broken drones and coordinating with Sally (Melissa Leo) at Mission Control on the Tet. Jack and Victoria are lovers, nearing the end of their tour, and looking forward to seeing the new civilization at Titan for the first time.
Kosinski is generous with his visuals. His is a remarkably beautiful vision. Much of the film's first half features Jack navigating its great expanses. With much of the earth heavily eroded, much of its oceans extracted, we are treated to lavish tracking shots of Jack on an off-road motorcycle racing through New York Harbor, between beached freighters and over the George Washington Bridge, which is nearly buried in sediment. He steps off the soil and onto the observation deck atop the Empire State Building, leading us to believe that much of the rest of New York has been buried for some reason. He repairs a drone at midfield in MetLife Stadium (though it seems unlikely that a Super Bowl would be played in a open venue so far north). The landscape is rich in deep blues and greens and grays. While many post-apocalyptic films prefer to focus on images of industrial decay, Kosinski presents a world that is slowly forgetting we were ever here. Everything seems organic and alive.
I proceed with caution, because the plot twists accumulate quickly, once they begin. Something is amiss. Extreme incredulity should always be employed anytime you've been told your memory has been wiped to preserve the sanctity of the mission. Jack and Victoria are hyper-idealized archetypes. They speak largely in platitudes and cliches (for reasons that actually serve the narrative). Sally's condescending tone over the radio seems impatient with Jack's growing curiosity. Jack suffers from persistent dreams of a pre-war New York, in which a beautiful, picturesque woman meets him on a busy sidewalk.
These suspicions are afforded the time to escalate naturally. The atmosphere of an epic begins to develop. Kosinski is patient, a pleasant surprise for a film so dependent on action to further its plot. Questions arise that are not asked but left for us to ponder in open space, and soon a film that did not seem at all like a thriller, seems very much like a thriller. Things begin to unravel quickly when the Scavs use a coded beacon to crash an old, pre-war NASA ship into the desert. Jack investigates. The ship had been loaded with pods carrying people in controlled hibernation. All but one perish. In the surviving pod is the woman from Jack's dreams.
From here, "Oblivion" careens through a labyrinth of twists and turns that are fairly predictable if you can recall the films being referenced, chiefly "Blade Runner" and Tarkovsky's masterful "Solaris", but the construct is so clever and well executed that it hardly matters. The film is thoughtful and political, with just the right degree of tongue-in-cheek modesty that has defined innumerable sci-fi cult classics. It draws a peculiar line on gender, with women occupying most positions of power, and most frequently entrusted with valuable information, while the men are left to the grunt work, and carry out the most brutish, if heroic behavior, though it must be conceded that neither prominent female character seems capable of acting independently of Jack during consequential moments.
Mostly, though, Kosinski injects "Oblivion" into a heavy current of discussion by making the film revolve around "drones" - unmanned, flying weaponry, over which every party has a vested interest. Much is made over who really controls them, and who their primary targets are, and how volatile that alignment can be. The drones do not pose a threat to Jack or Victoria, who are (allegedly) the only humans on the planet, but when the hibernating pods lie scattered around their crash sight, innocent human lives, the drones prove to be indiscriminate. They are a perilous and valuable weapon, and "Oblivion" casually suggests that those controlling them may indeed be the real villains. We just don't see it yet. That the movie is well photographed, well directed, and well acted don't count against it either.
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