If movies have taught us anything it’s that the world
will end at some time and a lone celebrity will be only survivor. The cause of
our end could be one of many things, God, the weather, aliens, or as most
sci-fi, it will be humans. The stories are all the same, we get destroyed and
discover who we really are and in the end we survive. I know in my last
sentence I just summed up every disaster movie, but we still like to watch
them. “Oblivion” is the disaster movie of the year, a story about destruction,
discovery and of course that lone celebrity, it’s Tom Cruise.
Jack (Cruise)
is part of the “mop up crew” on Earth. He and his partner Victoria (Andrea
Riseborough) are all that is left on Earth after it was attacked. We won the
war, but the planet is unlivable, so mankind has moved to another planet to
live. Jack and Victoria are there to repair drones that protect devices that
are extracting the Earth’s sea water. Jack is the maintenance guy, while
Victoria is his mission control, so to speak.
Life is pretty simple, everyday Jack and Victoria wake up, Jack goes and
fixes drones and reminisces what life was like before the war. Everything changes
when a vehicle crashes into Earth and Jack starts to see the real truth to what
happened.
It is easy to
want to enjoy this movie, it looks good, has a great soundtrack, and has Tom in
it, but the thing that it is missing is everything else. Written by Joseph
Kosinski, Karl Gajdusek, and Michael Arndt the story never really takes off.
The concept probably sounded really good on paper, but like everything life or
in this case like everything in Hollywood, sometimes things sound better than
they actually are. Cruise is actually pretty good as Jack Harper, so he does
not add to the problem. I for one like Cruise in most of the movies he does.
The issues lie in the story, which is slow and tedious. With a runtime of just
over two hours, everything that needed to be said could have been said in an
hour and a half. The film has a few twists, but some of them are easy to figure
out before they happen. I was really pushing to enjoy this movie, it seemed to
have it all from what I had read or saw before watching the movie. Instead what
I see is another typical movie about the destruction of our planet, and of
course New York, which never seems to survive anything, according to Hollywood.
The good thing is “Oblivion” is not in 3D, so it has that going for it at
least. My advice, wait until this comes out on video, or just watch “Wall-E”
again if you want to see a good movie about a sanitation
worker in the post-apocalyptic future.
Brian Taylor
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