A film
review by Richard Corliss, April 19, 2013.
Earth,
2077. Sixty years earlier, alien invaders had blown up our moon, and an
intergalactic battle ensued. We won the
war but lost the planet, says Jack Harper (Tom Cruise), a kind of grease-monkey pilot whose job is to repair
the drones that monitor desolate Earth while the rest of humanity lives in a
remote space station. His coworker and assigned girlfriend Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) directs Jack’s
flying sorties over the wreckage of Manhattan, which may literally be a
no-man’s land. Yet as he lies in bed with Victoria, Jack has visions of
another, mysterious woman (Olga
Kurylenko), from his fantasies or his past. I know you, but we’ve never met. I’m with you and I don’t know your
name. I know I’m dreaming, but it feels like more that. It feels like a memory.
How can that be?
And how
is it that science-fiction films imagine the worst for our future while steeped
in love-loss for our past? Perhaps because the genre blossomed, as literature
and then cinema, in the late 1940s — the time of the Cold War and the first
nuclear age — when our world’s two great powers played a deadly game of
mutually assured destruction, and when fearing the prospect of human extinction
was not paranoia, just common sense. It’s no wonder that any time before the
Bomb seemed Edenic to sci-fi writers, readers and moviegoers; any time after
might spell The End.
The same
warm ache of nostalgia envelops the Jack of 2077, the hero of Joseph Kosinski’s oh-so-serious Oblivion, for the pre-invasion Earth of
2017. He stands at the top of the Empire State Building, most of it covered in
sand and rubble, wanders through the caverns of the New York Public Library on
42nd Street (only eight blocks away from King Kong’s final perch but
miraculously not buried) and patrols Yankee Stadium, scene of the very last
World Series. He saves old books, a catcher’s mitt and baseball and some LPs
from the 1960s and ’70s; Procol Harum
keeps playing on his internal iTunes. Fixating on the 1948 Andrew Wyeth
painting Christina’s World, and on
his dream girl, Jack finds a verdant interior life in this wasteland by mixing
memory and desire. His poetic guide, though, is not Eliot but Macaulay, whose
famous couplet in The Lays of Ancient
Rome — And how can man die better
than facing fearful odds, / For the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his
Gods… — haunts Jack like a long-ago pop tune or a distant battle cry.
Oblivion must be the only science-fiction
film that borrows substantially from I Am
Legend, WALL-E and Sleepless in
Seattle — itself a remake of 1957′s An Affair
to Remember, which was a remake of 1939′s Love Affair. In fact, everything in this
movie keeps looking
backward. Victoria warns Jack that Our job
is to not remember. Remember? That’s the cue for this company man with a
rebellious streak to find his future in the past, to decide if he’s fishing for
memory or waking up inside of a dream. Jack must attend to the dual meaning of oblivion: nothing and forgetfulness.
If we’ve misplaced our memories, we’ve lost ourselves.
The
movie’s trailer and poster have alerted viewers that Jack and Victoria are not
alone on Earth. Morgan Freeman
briefly emerges from the underworld as a Zeus-Hades insurgent, sporting
sunglasses and chomping on a cigar. (Where’d he find that — in a subterranean
smoke shop?) Melissa Leo, with a
fake-syrupy Southern accent, is seen on Riseborough’s screen as a mid-level
operative back at Mission Control. And Kurylenko, also in theaters now as Ben
Affleck’s whirling wife in Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder, eventually shows up in person when Jack rescues her
from a shot-down spaceship on which she had taken a long cryogenic nap. (No
surprise: she looks great.) But Oblivion
is still so under-populated that. when Jack requires a suitable rival for a
bare-knuckles fight, it’s a clone of himself.
Kosinski,
the 3-D graphics whiz who has a Master’s degree in architecture from Columbia
University, made his feature-film debut with the 2010 Tron: Legacy (a sequel-remake that also hop-scotches through time).
Oblivion shows that Kosinski
certainly has an eye for spiffy shapes — the sleek watchtower, the collapsible
metallic grandeur of Jack’s aircraft, the platoon of drones with one glowering
red eye and the frowning face of a Pac-man goblin— amid a ravishingly barren
landscape. Indeed, the juggling of opposites is this director’s game: to make
an artistic statement while indulging his star’s need to be a Top Gun aerial ace, a moto-bike demon
and an old-fashioned romantic swain.
Cruise
nearly carries it off. At 50, with a few becoming facial creases but also
looking cryogenically preserved, he is still the boyish action star, a
perpetual-motion machine who’s been told No
so many times he’s stopped listening and leaped into the enthralling unknown.
The extreme close-ups that find only generic worry in Riseborough’s face are
kind to Cruise; he instinctively knows how to communicate to an audience
through a possibly thoughtful stare. (We haven’t seen the old-young smiling Tom
on the big screen for ages; he’s taken Will Smith’s lead and traded in his
trademark grin for a world-weary grimace.) After playing the desiccated Stacee
Jaxx in Rock of Ages, and the hobo
sleuth in Jack Reacher, Cruise
completes his Jack trilogy as Harper, spelunking inside the crevices of his memory
or fantasy.
The
exigencies of Cruise’s participation demand fights and flights. We get one
pretty cool space dogfight, as Jack plays bumper cars with a flotilla of enemy
aircraft, and one lame one that’s way too reminiscent of, and less thrilling
than, the climactic chase in the original Star
Wars. Rule for sci-fi directors: No more aerial Indy 500-style battles in
narrow canyons.
But the
biggest collision in Oblivion — one
Kosinski may not have intended — is between the feverish action scenes and the
slowness, we might say torpor, of the rest of the film. For all the shouting
and swooning, characters don’t connect; and by the end, when all the clones and
drones are accounted for, science-fiction entropy has given way to audience
ennui. Six minutes or 60 years after seeing the movie, viewers are unlikely to
remember it.
In
space, Jack hopes, someone may hear you dream. But in a movie theater, no one
will see you yawn.
Labels:
action, adventure, alien-invasion, mystery, sci-fi
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