OBLIVION review by Dorkman

A certain subgenre of musicals utilizes existing pop music as show tunes. Sometimes they focus on a single musical influence — MAMMA MIA and the music of ABBA, ACROSS THE UNIVERSE and the Beatles, WE WILL ROCK YOU and Queen — or sometimes it uses a variety of music, like ROCK OF AGES or MOULIN ROUGE. Whatever the case, the songs are used the same way original songs are used in musical theater — to advance the plot, reveal character, and drive the story forward. Often, the story is built around the songs so that the songs’ existing lyrics may serve this purpose (e.g. naming a character to match a name spoken in a song), to varying degrees of success. You’re really just there to enjoy the music; the story is gravy.

OBLIVION is like that, but instead of existing songs, it tells its story in a series of rearranged covers of various classic and iconic sci-fi images. Unique and groundbreaking it is not; but it is visually arresting — which is to be expected from the director of TRON: LEGACY — and it can even be compelling if you’re willing to check your inner nerdipedia at the door and not distract yourself by identifying and cataloguing each… we’ll say “homage”… as it arrives.

If you’ve seen the trailers, you know as much of the story as I can relate without spoilers. Sixty years before the events of the film, humanity made contact with an alien intelligence, and our association was less than peaceful. The fight left the planet uninhabitable, and the only human presence is the “cleanup crew” of Jack and Victoria (Tom Cruise and Andrea Riseborough) maintaining resource-collecting droids here on Earth in preparation for our final, permanent move to humanity’s new home on Titan. But when a human spacecraft crash-lands, Jack discovers that he and Victoria are not the only humans left, and their mission is not what it seems.

I don’t want to spoil the film any further, but for anyone familiar with the genre’s tropes, it admittedly holds few surprises; and anyone familiar with the call-and-response nature of Hollywood storytelling in general will be able to predict major payoffs based on their less-than-elegant setups. Still, I’m not convinced that this is a major strike against it. A huge number of movies, after all, follow a lot of the same beats, and the audience goes to see them to watch a new take on the old forms. OBLIVION’s passing of each checkpoint simply risks calling more attention to itself because of the additional visual similarities to what has gone before.

Taken on its own, the story is solid, with the exception of the final explanation of the mystery, or rather, the manner and extent to which it is explained. While I object to the rising “mystery box” mindset which believes it’s okay for a movie to ask a bunch of questions it never bothers to answer (and that this makes a movie “intelligent”), there is such a thing as too much explaining. For example, if INCEPTION had explained how, exactly, the dream-sharing machine worked, it would’ve broken the film for me, because now I can no longer engage in the story the machine is facilitating when I’m fixated on how stupid and impossible the machine’s modus operandi is.

OBLIVION’s conclusion is a bit like that. It tells a little too much about what happened at the heart of the mystery when a savvy sci-fi fan could have sussed it out, again, just based on knowing the tropes of the genre. Moreover, it delivers the explanation via a device — a space shuttle flight recorder which is the MacGuffin of the second act — which according to the very story it reveals could not have been there when it happened. It is frustrating — perhaps so frustrating as to break the film entirely for some viewers. I had enjoyed the film enough that I was willing to let it slide, but your mileage may vary.

I’m going to have to come to terms with the fact that, despite any real-life kookery, I think Tom Cruise is a good actor. In science fiction and fantasy, the key to believability has always been less in the visual effects or production design, and more in whether or not the characters seemed to buy into it. Granted, Cruise’s religion of choice teaches that something essentially like the backstory of OBLIVION is actually true, but whatever the reason, he sells it and makes it a little easier to go along for the ride.

Andrea Riseborough does well with what she’s given, although she’s given little more than a series of increasingly hysterical outbursts. Olga Kurylenko, as the Mysterious Woman from Space, is little more than set dressing, existing only to serve as an occasional catalyst for Cruise to take action. I can remember the plot fairly well as it pertains to Cruise’s character, but I barely remember Kurylenko at all. Morgan Freeman is, you know, Morgan Freeman. This isn’t a negative, I’m just saying, his performance doesn’t defy expectations in any way.

I said earlier that the believability of a sci-fi world hinges more on characters buying into it than VFX or production design necessarily does, but don’t get me wrong: in both cases, the work in OBLIVION is stunning. The VFX are pretty much flawless, and the production design succeeds in invoking both the white rooms and round windows aesthetic of “classic” 60s sci-fi, and the sprawling post-apocalyptic wastelands of the last decade or so. I don’t say this often anymore, but the film is worth watching — and studying — for the visuals alone.

OBLIVION is in many ways everything sci-fi fans want in a sci-fi movie. The only problem is that sci-fi fans have already gotten it in various films of the last 30 years. Had OBLIVION come out in 1975, it would be the greatest sci-fi film of all time. But coming out in 2013, it struggles to be anything more than sci-fi’s greatest hits.