Oblivion from Universal Pictures Movie Review presented by West Coast Midnight Run

OBLIVION
Universal Pictures
MPAA Rating PG-13

(action, adventure, sci-fi, fantasy)

Starring: Tom Cruise, Olga Kurylenko, Morgan Freeman, Andrea Riseborough

Directed by Joseph Kosinski

Running Time: 2 hr. 4 min.

Score: A-

By Celine Wang

Earth is on the brink. Aliens have in fact invaded our planet and plowed it back into the stone age.

A team of scientists are entrusted with safekeeping what’s left of our world.

Yet a big secret looms in the background as our heroes implement their day-to-day emergency re-boot, inspections and maintenance protocols.

Original source photo © Universal Pictures

Oblivion is a tough film to critique, it blends several styles of recent filmmaking and story elements in depicting a devastated planet Earth and Humanity on the brink of extinction.

Although the movie is science fiction and packs a huge dose of action excerpts in the official film trailers, the actual adventure is a little bit different and the story has twists and turns that are now landmark Tom Cruise films such as the Mission Impossible series, The Firm and Vanilla Sky.

If you are a video game addict seeking another notch on the adrenaline scale

than the previous year, forget it this movie will not meet your expectations as far as the kill ratio quotient. You will not find a Fast and Furious adventure macho mano-a-mano set in the future with spacecrafts and drones.

Avid moviegoers and science fiction buffs will find plenty of references in other films, the easiest being the spidery and fragile looking craft used by Mark Whalberg's character in the recent remake of Planet of the Apes. However for me the movie's Jack Harper had more in common with Spence, the light gyro craft pilot in the movie series Mad Max/Road Warrior and his eagle eye vantage point flying here and there in

efforts to help the band of refugees attempting to survive a blighted future.

Top film critics have praised the film's visual style and blasted the thin story (script). Some of the criticism is justified yet overall the film is far more entertainment than the average rating it has received. I am certain if Stanley Kubric was still around he would remind some just how big 2001 A Space Odyssey was on script and dialogue, since this movie, by comparison to recent sci-fi flicks is more similar in vein to Kubric's ode to Humanity's evolution.

Movies are visual animals, made for

telling stories with photography rather than dialogue. Although so many movies have been adaptations of novels and stage plays, movies remain a visual device, designed to communicate on an emotional and visceral level with pictures and music rather than with complex narratives and character evolutions.

Oblivion has strong performances by Tom Cruise (as Jack Harper) who carries the film by underplaying his star power, and with Andrea Riseborough, an English actress that has been recently featured in Never Let Me Go and The Devil's Whore, a British miniseries. Morgan Freeman

is superb as the leader of a small group of resistance fighters. Olga Kurylenko is a French Ukranian actress that rounds up the list as the mysterious love interest of Jack Harper.

Without revealing too many plot points, there is a scene in the film in which Julia (Kurylenko) is being hydrated after being retrieved from stasis and the dialogue that ensues informs us that she has been asleep for at least 60 years - and yet behold, she is not surprised nor shocked at all by Jack nor is he when they both later share distant memories of a previous Earth.

Be warned this scene in particular

makes many other story events contradictory if not impossible. The continuity auditors on the script did a really nice job of overlooking a huge gap that dislocates the entire subsequent acts all the way to the second half of the movie.

Music for the film was composed by M83, a French shoegaze band that sounds a little like Daft Punk's work on Tron Legacy however some of the tracks are closer in style with Hans Zimmer's compositions for the Dark Knight trilogy.