What ever you have to say about Tom Cruise, most will have to admit at the very least he is a compelling actor and one who knows how to make an action film. Personally I think he is brilliant, that doesn’t mean I’d want to invite him to dinner but given the offer of a Cruise film I will sit back and almost always be entertained.
With the promise of Cruise in a Sci Fi setting, I hoped this film would deliver the escapist entertainment as he has delivered before. And in short I wasn’t disappointed.
Cruise plays Tech 49 Jack Harper, one half of a two man crew left to keep security drones working on the desolated and majority uninhabited earth. Following the events of an alien invasion, the earth won but now sits covered in radiation, and its population tucked away on Jupiter’s moon Titan. The only reason Jack and Victoria, here played by Andrea Riseborough, his lover/Air Traffic controller are there is because our oceans are being sucked up and converted to energy for the Titan colony and the remaining alien invaders called Scavs try to shut the massive water siphons down.
The film is directed by Tron Legacy’s Joseph Kosinski and although I enjoyed that film, and this one does use a fair few special effects, I was relived to see fewer blue screens and more actual locations. The wide-open deserts used offer some really interesting and beautiful backdrops, throw in a hint of a destroyed landmark here and there and you have the makings of a great post apocalyptic world to play in.
The story kicks off with the crash landing of a mysterious pod from space and within are the stasis capsules of human beings, one capsule being Olga Kurylenko’s, someone Jack has been seeing in his dreams. With her arrival Jack’s life is thrown into turmoil and they start to discover there is more to earth then first might appear.
As entertaining as the story is, and it is, it ends up becoming strangely familiar and pretty predictable. No plot twist that eventually rears its head is unexpected and is often handled by other films far better. Don’t get me wrong, seeing similar elements in films is inevitable and can still be just fine, but when they are dealt with better in the original you do start to wonder, what was the point?
If you are yet to see Oblivion, and do not want certain things given away, avoid this coming paragraph. The notion that they are alone to look after the world of the drones already start to feel a little reminiscent of MOON, a brilliant 2009 film by Duncan Jones. With that thought in my head early on it, thanks in part to the same plot being used that Cruise and Riseborough are only weeks away from ending their stint on earth in two weeks to then head home, it was no great shock to then discover they is just one of many Jack and Victorias. An army of clones to keep machines running and protected sounds awfully like The Matrix, and when you have a dark space craft lined with row upon row of see through incubation pods filled with foetal Tom Cruises, well that isn’t a coincidence. These two films did exploited clones and machine overlords so much better.
It seems so much effort was put into the scenery and setting the characters fell to the wayside. No singular character stood out as some one exceptional or in any way layered, which does make the story drag. Unfortunate for a run time of two hours. All in all it was an enjoyable romp but it wasn’t as deep as it tried to be and it didn’t break into any new ground.
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