Oh, "Oblivion"

There are only about six named roles in "Oblivion," of which I was only convinced that one was a character with anything approximating a real personality. This is Commander Jack Harper, played by Tom Cruise as the usual everyman he's played in so many action movies over the years. Of the other five roles, three are minor characters who are essentially plot devices. The remaining two are a pair of women, Victoria Olsen (Andrea Riseborough) and Julia Rusakova (Olga Kurylenko), whose relationships with Jack are supposed to be central to the film's premise. However, both women are so abysmally blank, and their actions so contrived, it's difficult to accept that they're supposed to be real people.

Initially we're introduced to Jack and Victoria, who we are told act as a skeleton maintenance crew on Earth, which has been abandoned for fifty years after attacking aliens rendered the planet largely uninhabitable. The humans won the war, but a few of the alien "Scavs" remain, trying to disrupt the power stations that convert seawater into energy for the human colonies on Titan. Mechanized flying drones do most of the patrolling and fighting, but Jack and Victoria remain in order to handle drone repairs. They've been alone together in their little tower outpost for nearly five years, getting their orders from a mission commander named Sally (Melissa Leo), in the orbiting "Tet" space station above them. In order to keep important information from falling into the hands of the enemy, Jack and Victoria have had all memories from before their mission wiped. Jack, however, still dreams about a woman named Julia, and has a fascination with surviving items from before the war. Morgan Freeman and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau are also in this movie, but to say who they play involves more spoilers than the viewer should probably know about in advance.

Many high-concept science fiction films often suffer from feeling cold and detached, where the filmmakers get so carried away designing their gorgeous futurescapes and new technology that they neglect their characters. Joseph Kosinksi, who directed "TRON Legacy," succeeds here in creating a beautiful dystopian world with an interesting history, and relaying a fairly intelligent, ambitious science-fiction story. However, the characters meant to inhabit that story are flatter than cardboard, and it's only thanks to Tom Cruise in the lead, doing what Tom Cruise does best, that the movie holds together at all. Olga Kurylenko and Andrea Riseborough are both very lovely women and competent actresses, but the parts they play are just a collection of convenient traits, and neither gets a single one more than they absolutely need for the plot to function. Victoria loves and is possessive of Jack, she's not the least bit curious about anything happening down on Earth, and she is loyal to Mission Control above all else. All those things come into play in the story exactly how you'd expect them to. Julia at one point gets her hands on a firearm and gets to blast away at her enemies, which only emphasizes how utterly useless she is during the rest of the movie. As for Mr. Freeman and Mr. Coster-Waldau, it's maddening how wasted they are in throwaway parts.

However, to Kosinski's credit, the strength of his worldbuilding very nearly lets him get away with it. I admire the early scenes of the film, where Jack is exploring the ruined Earth in his spiffy flying "Bubble Ship." The thoughtful production design is the movie's biggest asset, the way that it takes its time to show us all the nooks and crannies, and the way it subtly feels like a throwback to all those great old hard science-fiction films of the 1970s, with their more uncluttered, monochrome environments. The mood of the film is oddly inviting, with its moments of stillness of silence, though it never feels slow-paced at any point. I love the look of the aliens and the drones, the way they behave and Jack's interactions with them. Though the film is terribly predictable for anyone who's watched enough science-fiction, and the ideas aren't well developed at all, it's still nice to see anyone commit so wholeheartedly to this kind of material, and trust the audience to be able to follow along with all the technobabble and narrative twistiness.

So I came out of "Oblivion" impressed, even though I don't think it was a good movie. It was a decently entertaining watch though, proving that though Tom Cruise may be getting older, he's still a solid leading man and capable of carrying an exceptionally nerdy science-fiction action movie better than most actors half his age. And Joseph Kosinski is still a terribly promising young director who I hope gets the chance to try an original project again one of these days, and improve on "Oblivion."
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