First out of the blocks, though, is Oblivion – hoping to kick of the seasonal craze with the eminently-bankable Tom Cruise, in his first sci-fi film since the remake of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds eight years ago.
Just a few months after launching his latest action-man character “Jack Reacher” in cinemas, Cruise has has made a slight syllabic change for his character in Oblivion: a former soldier named “Jack Harper”, now a robot repairman and, supposedly, the last man on earth.
Harper and his co-worker (and lover) Vika Olsen are a caretaker team, helping guard a few precious sea-sucking fusion reactors on behalf of the rest of humanity – which we’re told has decamped to one of the moons of Saturn, abandoning the ruined earth to alien “scavengers”.
With memories of their past lives wiped, Jack and Vika follow orders relayed from “The Tet” – a huge, pyramidal spacecraft in orbit – and Vika, at least, looks forwards to leaving their earthly duties in a few weeks, when the reactors have finished their task of swallowing up the earth’s oceans.
But Jack isn’t so keen to leave – he’s haunted by dreams of New York City before the disaster, and in particular by the memory of a woman whose name he does not know (former Bond girl Olga Kurylenko).
And when a strange spacecraft crashes nearby, and a mysterious woman on board turns out to be his long-lost wife, Jack and Vika’s world starts to rapidly unravel.
In the interests of suspense, the film’s producers have appealed to journalists not to reveal the various plot twists that carry the movie to its conclusions. Unfortunately, you’d have to have missed every science fiction film in the last twenty years not to see them coming. Still, ‘spoiler alert’.
The tampered-memory trope is the most obvious, especially as it was revived only a few months back in the (completely unnecessary) remake of Total Recall.
Morgan Freeman then turns up in sunglasses and a black cloak, too-obviously modelled on Morpheus from The Matrix, in effect offering Jack a “red pill” that will dispel his illusions.
To keep the producers happy, I’ll not spoil the end of Oblivion here, but when you see it you’ll know immediately which sci-fi blockbuster it’s shamelessly borrowed from.
Cruise delivers a compelling performance that combines his usual physical agility and stuntwork with one of his more likeable characters, a dreamer reluctant to let go of his old life; while Riseborough as the ice-cool radio dispatcher and girlfriend Vika steals every scene she’s in, but since those scenes are mainly limited to her talking on the phone, that’s not a lot to go on.
Unfortunately Kurylenko’s character is so lacking in dimension that it might be played by just about any pretty girl, and Morgan Freeman merely phones in his lines from behind his sunglasses.
The real stars of Oblivion are the outstanding production design and visual effects, including a compound bubble-shaped aircraft that Cruise’s hero whisks about in, and the impressive landscapes of the ruined earth (filmed mostly in Iceland.)
The end result is that Oblivion is a stronger visual experience rather than a narrative one – maybe there’s just now little left to say about the future that hasn’t already been said.
3 Stars (out of 5)
Director:
Joseph Kosinski
Stars:
Tom Cruise
Andrea Riseborough
Olga Kurylenko
Morgan Freeman
Running time:
124 minutes