OBLIVION (Joseph Kosinski). 124 minutes. Opens Friday (April 19). See listing. Rating: NN
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: on a devastated future Earth, a lone worker spends his days maintaining the apparatus left behind by the departed human race. He cares for a plant that he found growing unexpectedly out of the ruined ground. He enjoys faded memories of the world that was. And then one day, a female falls out of the sky, triggering feelings he didn’t even know he had.
That’s the plot of WALL*E, but it’s also the premise of Oblivion, at least for the first 45 minutes or so. After that, all bets are off, as director and co-writer Joseph Kosinski cannibalizes bits and pieces of every SF movie released between 1968 and today.
I’m not kidding. Everything – 2001: A Space Odyssey and the original Planet Of The Apes Silent Running and The Omega Man The Matrix and Open Your Eyes I, Robot, Moon, Inception, a couple of Star Trek episodes and at least one of the Star Wars movies.
There are direct visual quotes of Tarkovsky’s Solaris and McTiernan’s Predator and Emmerich’s Independence Day. Kosinski even steals a moment from The English Patient, sure that no one in his target audience has ever seen an Anthony Minghella movie.
The credits claim that Oblivion is based on a graphic novel written by Kosinski himself, rather than on his Netflix queue, and I guess that’s possible. He made Tron: Legacy, so obviously he’s used to taking existing concepts and making them his own, though somehow the magic and the soul of the original material gets lost along the way. (And if you thought Tron: Legacy was hollow, wait until you see what Oblivion thinks is high emotion.)
But let’s explore Oblivion on its own terms. Tom Cruise stars as the plucky little maintenance droid – sorry, the entirely human Jack Harper, introduced to us on the morning of March 14, 2077 along with his professional and personal companion, Victoria (Andrea Riseborough, one of Cruise’s many overqualified co-stars in this project). It’s their job to maintain the drones that patrol a ruined Earth, keeping it safe from the alien “scavs” that invaded 60 years earlier, shattering the moon and spinning the planet into devastating environmental collapse.
Somewhat heroically, Jack and Victoria have remained behind to maintain the network of drones and reactors designed to provide energy for the off-world colony on “Titan, a moon of Saturn,” we’re told more than once, just in case we don’t know what Titan is. Everything’s fine, except that now and then Jack has phantom memories of meeting a woman (Olga Kurylenko) on the observation deck of the Empire State Building before everything went to hell.
And then, one day, a ship falls from the sky, and the woman is inside it and Jack learns that almost nothing is what it seems. The thing is, those of us in the audience who don’t live in sensory deprivation tanks and have seen all the movies Kosinski is borrowing from are way ahead of him, wondering how it is that Cruise’s character is so slow to figure out what’s really happening. (Did the space invaders take out Netflix after they blew up the moon?)
Oblivion is very pretty to look at Kosinski may not have a brain in his head, but he’s got a great eye. Even when he’s borrowing specific images from other movies, he integrates them smoothly into the visual design of a given scene. That said, he’s also guilty of lingering on certain elements long enough for us to start to realize that those elements make absolutely no sense in the world of the film. I wish I could believe he was doing it on purpose to make us question things, but there is no way that Oblivion is that self-aware.
Every time someone opens his or her mouth, the script trips over itself with quasi-meaningful dialogue that’s supposed to be cleverly layered but really just hangs a lantern on how “cleverly layered” the dialogue is. Not five minutes in – seriously, not even five minutes in – one of those not too clever lines makes specific reference to the movie from which Oblivion’s primary plot is stolen.
It’s rare that a movie so resolutely unclever tells you, straight out, how clever it’s going to be. But then Oblivion doesn’t pull that off either.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @wilnervision
