Three years ago, fledgling feature film director Joseph Kosinksi impressed Hollywood when his debut feature film, Tron: Legacy, a sequel to Walt Disney Pictures' nearly thirty-year-old science fiction film, Tron, managed to gross a pretty healthy $400 million at the global box-office. The original Tron was a genuine box-office disappointment back in 1982, but which had found popularity on home video and had generated a cult following. Kosinski's sequel far outperformed the box-office returns of the original, even adjusting prices for inflation and 3-D surcharges. Personally, I liked the film, though it could have been done better.
Even though Tron: Legacy didn't quite live up to my hopes, I found myself interested in Kosinski's next project, another science fiction film called Oblivion starring Tom Cruise, which was based on an unpublished graphic novel co-written by Kosinksi himself. Surprisingly little was said about this film, though I was able to catch at least one trailer, and I found myself intrigued. It was clear enough that the film was set in some sort of post-apocalyptic wasteland, and by itself, that was a selling point for me.
The film takes place in 2077, approximately 60 years after a cataclysmic war between the people of Earth and an alien race has ravaged the planet's surface. The Earth's moon has been destroyed, throwing the planet's weather and tectonic movement into chaos, and in the aftermath humanity has abandoned the Earth in order to resettle on Titan, one of the moon's of Saturn. There remains work to be done on earth, however; massive generators are placed in the oceans of the Earth to gather up energy needed by the new colony on Titan. Drones protect the massive generators from attack by the stragglers of the alien race known only as the Scavengers, who have actually remained on the planet. All of this is more or less explained by Jack Harper (Cruise), a human whose job it is to maintain and, when necessary, repair the aforementioned drones. He works in tandem with a communications officer named Vika (Andrea Riseborough), and it is their understanding that when the energy has been harnessed from the Earth's oceans, they will rendezvous with the human settlers on the space station Tet and leave for their new home on Titan.
Jack, however, is haunted by strange dreams of New York City before the world ended, in which he meets a mysterious woman (Olga Kurylenko) on top of the Empire State Buidling. He knows this is impossible, as this could only have taken place years before he was even born. He has had his memory wiped several times, a requirement for his missions, but he cannot remove this dream from his subconscious. When one routine patrol to retrieve a stricken drone leads to an extremely close encounter between Jack and the Scavengers, he starts wondering about more than just his dreams, and what he finds could spell the end of the world as he knows it.
Tom Cruise spent most of his younger years trying out all kinds of different roles, and it was only when he was knocking on the door of his 40s that he first ventured into science fiction; collaborating with Steven Spielberg on one of my favorite Spielberg films: 2002's Minority Report. This is his second "pure" sci-fi film (I don't count War of the Worlds, which played more like a disaster film) and though I remain partial to the Spielberg film, I have to give Cruise credit for a pretty earnest performance here. With a very small cast, it basically fell upon him to carry this film, and he rises to the occasion. Most of the film's first act is him acting opposite Riseborough, who also acquits herself well as Vika, whose relationship with Jack, while obviously involving some form of intimacy, seems oddly cold and clinical for reasons that become clear as the narrative unfolds.
The visuals are impeccable; I am a huge fan of Harper's dragonfly-like patrol craft, which was reportedly inspired by a helicopter, and the overall aesthetic of their monitoring tower, with its glass walls and Zen-like simplicity serving as a welcome stylistic departure from the militaristic aesthetic that usually pervades these science fiction movies. I was also fond of the music score composed by Anthony Gonzalez and Joseph Trapanese, although at times it sounded like an odd blend of Hans Zimmer music and '80s pop music, and an overbearing one at that.
One problem I had with the film, however, was its pacing. Even though the timing of some of the action sequences was strategic enough, to my mind Kosinski failed to build the requisite tension. The first half of the movie should be about establishing the threat of the "Scavs" and yet the clean, antiseptic environment that Jack and Vika live and work in, as well as the supposedly intimate but oddly arm's length relationship between the two, tends to neutralize the overtones of menace; it removes the sense of urgency. The second half of the film, where most of the action takes place, feels like it comes from a completely different movie. The shift in tone was a little jarring for me, though I can admit that when the action picked up I paid a bit more attention.
Another problem I had was not with the film itself but with the boneheads responsible for marketing it, because the film's trailers basically gave away a huge plot point. The irony here is that Universal Pictures was actually quite secretive about this movie in the months up to its release; one wonders why they gave the people who cut the trailers free rein to blow the lid off one of the film's most important secrets. This actually went a long way towards defusing any sense of tension I might have felt at the narrative. The good news is that there is at least one major plot twist that has not been spoiled by the trailers. One could argue that even without the "spoilerific" trailers, the plot twists are hackneyed and can be seen from a mile away, but to my mind it's all in the telling, and while I will concede that there were a number of cliches at work, I think Kosinski's approach was fresh enough to justify whatever Universal spent on this movie.
Overall, I'd say this was a reasonably good movie with very impressive visuals that could have been a lot better with a tighter script, and which would have benefited quite a bit from a more discreet marketing campaign.
3/5
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