Science fiction from here to Oblivion

It’s counterproductive and downright criminal for a science fiction film to lack ambition. Anything less than soaring spectacle on a grand scale is just a waste of all that Space, the endless kind that we all float in, not the literal space from wall to wall and floor to ceiling in the theater.

It is for this reason — its profound sense of ambition and imagination — that makes Oblivion a stellar sci-fi picture. In many ways, it’s a straightforward and proto-typical techno-tinted space opera, but then it is hyper-injected with almost every sci-fi theme that we’ve so far discovered. Just look at this laundry list of Oblivion’s future ideas: space travel, sentient technology, alien invasions, memory wipes, cloning, bio-engineering, laser battles, hydro conversion plants, Saturn’s exploration and colonization, apartments in the clouds, hovercrafts, robotic killing machines, sub-orbital space stations, moon physics and Earth’s untimely destruction. And that’s just the quick list. It’s as if Philip K. Dick penned a story with George Jetson during a Daft Punk show.

Certainly some people will find all this sci-fi geekiness to be a bit heavy-handed — “It’s too much muchness,” they might say — even as they are dazzled by its electro-thrills and the stunning vistas of our future planet ravaged by the destruction of the moon, chunks of it crumbling off into the cosmos of beyond. I found all the science fiction to be liberating and intoxicating. I like movies that aren’t afraid to let loose and give us all they got. Too few movies fill us with wonder and awe. That’s why I appreciated The Fifth Element, another movie that had a great deal of silly fun within the sci-fi genre. It knew it was over the top and simply didn’t care.

Oblivion doesn’t much care either. It is more Star Trek than Star Wars or Fifth Element. There are fewer nuts and bolts in its world, which is designed around smooth edges, bubbly domes and see-through panels. Everything is in cool grey-blues, and lit with futuristic fluorescents that seem to cast a damp glow off all the plasticy non-reflective surfaces. It all feels like an Apple product, which is not a slam on either Apple or Oblivion. It’s just all very clean and sterile. It’s here that we meet Jack (Tom Cruise), drone repairman and steward of Earth. He lives in a house that floats in the clouds on a spindly little arm that doesn’t seem strong enough to hold up a tray of fast food. He lives with Victoria (Andrea Riseborough), who is his lover and chief radio operator in their two-person “effective team” — we hear that phrase a lot. Victoria has a curious physical feature: her eyes are always dilated. Jack’s job is to ensure hundreds of hovering robotic security drones are in tip-top shape; the drones guard these giant water plants that are vacuuming up the oceans. Victoria’s job is to monitor his security when he’s out in the field. They are the last two humans on the planet, and in two weeks, when they depart for Saturn’s moon, the planet will be empty.

Much of the pre-story is told by Jack in an opening narration: The year is 2077. Earth is a wasteland. An alien race blew up the moon and it sent Earth’s oceans and tectonic plates into a cataclysmic mambo of devastation. Then there was an invasion. The aliens, called scavs, were defeated, but Earth had to be evacuated anyway. Now it’s just Jack and Victoria and a massive command center called Tet that maintains a steady orbit above them. The movie has many secrets, and I dare not spoil any of them for you, so I will stop there in discussing the plot further. Know this, though: the secrets start spilling mid-movie and then persistently gush onto the screen right up until the end. I found myself continuously surprised at where Oblivion was taking me and why.

The film, based on a yet-to-be-published graphic novel co-written by the film’s director, Joseph Kosinski, is very much filled with classic tech-fueled nerdiness, including zipping space ships, hovering robots, collapsible motorcycles and laser pistols. I found some of the pew-pew shootouts to be a little obnoxious, though they are consistently well choreographed and visually interesting. A shot of Jack dropping through a library roof made me gasp. Just when the action and intensity seem poised to dumb down the tone, though, the film can veer unexpectedly into areas with cerebral undertones. It’s not quite as serious or existential as movies such as Solaris or Moon, but I think Oblivion can rest easy it’s not a mindless action movie. 

Kosinski is certainly a director I plan to start watching more carefully in the future — pun not intended. I thoroughly enjoyed his Tron reboot from 2010 and now here I am again stunned at his vision of the future. I especially enjoyed how lyrical and rhythmic some of his scenes play out; Kosinski has a Michael Mann-like knack for picking appropriate music for his films and then editing at the music’s pace. French shoegaze band M83 does all the music here, and every atmospheric piece is perfect for Oblivion’s vision of future technology and space. The music also gives Cruise — as electric as ever here in a genre he must be quite at home in — a chance to stare out onto the horizon and observe its beauty. Cruise, whose face and body have barely aged in his long career (an appropriate aspect in this film's casting), is a formidable force when the film is in detective mode early on. Less so later on when action scenes are propelling us forward. Riseborough, though, is the acting powerhouse here. You'll view her with skepticism simply because her character seems privy to the film's darkest mysteries, but by the end you'll view her with sadness and pain. 

Back to Kosinski: If the young director, who’s quickly becoming the next J.J. Abrams, does anything wrong here, it’s that he doesn’t justify the look of the world enough. Manhattan sits under 500 feet of rock, yet buildings still stand even as they jut out from cliff faces. How does rock and debris crush a city, yet not topple the Empire State Building? In other locations, largely intact jumbo jets sit in shallow tidepools. At times the setting appears to be thousands of years from now, yet Jack tells us it’s only been 50 years since the Earth was rocked by the moon’s obliteration. The barren wastelands (parts of the movie were filmed in Iceland) look neat, but Oblivion doesn’t explain why the world looks the way it does.

That aside, though,I found Oblivion to be an extraordinary sci-fi movie, and a delightful way to begin what is sure to be a high-energy summer. Lastly, let me encourage you to see the movie in a true IMAX theater; not one of those re-rigged half-sized IMAX screens that some theaters try to pass off to moviegoers. The entire movie — not just certain sequences, such as in The Dark Knight Rises, for instance — fills the giant IMAX screen, and the sound is exceptionally crisp and loud. At one point, I looked down at my clothes and they were vibrating from the film’s thundering sound effects. Sit dead center about halfway up and let that giant picture envelope you. It’s an incredible movie experience.