Oblivion - Moon-lite

The first film that I watched on my flight to Chicago two weeks ago was Oblivion.  This appears to be the latest attempt to re-invigorate Tom Cruise's up-and-down career, this time by giving him another sci-fi action role in which he gets to look tough and caring while having not only one but two love interests each young enough to be his daughter.  Seriously - Andrea Riseborough and Olga Kurylenko are 19 and 17 years younger than him respectively.  More evidence that you're not allowed to grow old and be female in Hollywood, aka the "What happened to Meg Ryan" effect.

Oblivion opens with a background story to a future gone wrong, a future in which Earth was attacked by aliens known as the Scavs.  It was a war that humanity eventually won, but at great cos to the Earth and its population.  The remains of humanity live off the surface now, on a great pyramid called the Tet that orbits the Earth and from which engineers struggle to make use of Earth's remaining meagre resources.  Tom Cruise and Andrea Riseborough play two such engineers, a crack team who live on a floating platform above the surface of the Earth and act as custodians to several huge fusion reactors and the flying drones that act as mobile defences against the remaining Scavs.  The perils of the mission in front of them is offset by a strong loving bond between them, as such they seem ideally-placed to carry out this long mission isolated from the rest of humanity.

After a close encounter with a group of Scavs, and after discovering a building that seems to be triggering dormant memories, Jack (Cruise's character) starts to ask a questions about the true purpose of their mission on Earth.  When an ancient relic of the war between the humans and the Scavs crashes nearby and he thinks he recognises one of the survivors, he resolves to get to the bottom of the nagging doubts gnawing away at his brain.

Oblivion is a very good science fiction film.  It has beautiful sets, a genuinely futuristic aesthetic, an excellent concept and nice little science fiction touches such as the deadly menace given off by the hovering drones.  Andrea Riseborough in particular gives an outstanding performance as a woman torn between loyalty to a person and loyalty to a mission.  The comparisons with Moon are undeniable though (though to actually compare them in detail would involve too many spoilers), and though it definitely isn't anywhere near being a rip-off it gets very close to it in many ways.

In fact, if it wasn't for the fact that Moon is such a spectacularly brilliant film I'm sure I would be rating Oblivion a lot higher.  The biggest downside to the film is that it feels a little bit like a committee of Hollywood execs saw Moon and decided that they fancied a slice of that pie for themselves.  So they got someone to write a similar-ish story but with more guns, action and attractive women but fewer disturbing smiley-faced androids.  There are some people out there who will see that as an upgrade, personally see it as bordering on copyright infringement.  A smaller let-down is that the film is billed as starring Morgan Freeman, and when he doesn't appear for 30 minutes a wandering mind might start to wonder where he is.  From there is isn't too hard to start guessing the plot twists.

Overall I want to end the review on a positive point, because I definitely enjoyed Oblivion.  It has the right blend of action, hard science fiction, future tech and humanity to keep everyone happy.  It mixes those things up well and tells an engaging story with a number of twisty bits which is only really damped when comparing to one of the best science fiction films of recent years.  The makers of Elysium should watch and learn.