deposits Tom Cruise in a barren landscape, giving him more stunts than sense.
Sci-fi film is slick but sorely lacking in surprises
Oblivion Starring: Tom Cruise, Morgan Freeman, Olga Kurylenko, Andrea
Riseborough Directed by: Joseph Kosinski Running time: 126 minutes Parental guidance: Brief nudity, violence, coarse
language Playing at: Angrignon, Banque Scotia, Brossard, Cavendish, Colossus, Côte des Neiges, Deux Montagnes, Kirkland, Lacordaire, LaSalle, Marché Central, Sources, Sphèretech, Taschereau
cinemas Things are not what they seem in the sleek sci-fi film Oblivion, a two-hour exercise in set design, empty calories and Tom Cruise. It would be better if you could figure out what they seem, so you could be properly shocked.
Nevertheless, Cruise remains a powerhouse of leaping, running, taking his shirt off and being a daredevil pilot: It’s Top Gun in outer space.
He plays Jack Harper, the last man on Earth. It’s 2077, and an alien race called the scavengers has destroyed our moon, resulting in an apocalypse — the toll on songwriters alone must have been devastating — that has left barren landscapes with the occasional ruined rollercoaster and the Empire State Building buried up to its observation deck in sand, the usual cinematic detritus of the end of days.
“We won the war but lost the planet,” Jack says.
It’s his job to repair drones, flying balls that look like what would happen if R2D2 got its corners rounded off and could fly. The drones protect the power plants that suck up sea water and create electricity for the rest of humanity, which has decamped to Titan, one of the moons of Saturn. Some of the scavengers, called “scavs” for short, are still around trying to sabotage things, but the drones fry them pretty effectively.
Jack lives with Victoria (Andrea Riseborough of W.E., a bodacious English rose) in a mountaintop glass-and-metal show home with a glass swimming pool tucked underneath. It looks like an iPod as designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
Oblivion was directed by Joseph Kosinski (the Tron reboot), who has style to burn. Unfortunately he also has a screenplay he might as well throw in after it.
Something is troubling Jack, however: He’s had his annual memory wipe, but he keep-shaving-black-and-white dreams about being on the Empire State Building with Olga Kurylenko, the ex-Bond Girl who makes guest appearances in many a fantasy, one imagines.
For a while, you think maybe Jack just saw Quantum of Solace too often, but again, things are not as they seem.
Jack and Victoria are preparing to return to Titan. Like cops in an urban thriller, they just have a couple of weeks to go, always a bad sign.
Jack goes off to fight the scavs in his futuristic bubble-themed helicopter, while Victoria stays at home and talks via next-generation Skype to the mysterious Sally (Melissa Leo), the commander on Titan who checks up on their mission and monitors the health of their relationship. Judging from the scene where Victoria swims nude in their pool, the relationship is pretty good.
Things change when a spaceship crashes in one of the planet’s desolate areas, and who should show up but Olga Kurylenko as Julia, a space commander who’s been in a deep sleep for 60 years and has awakened to find herself in a mash-up of every sci-fi movie of the previous century.
You can find everything from The Matrix to Planet of the Apes to Star Wars, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing,
Tom Cruise is left with nothing much to play but his usual energetic earnestness.
but it sure crowds the galaxy.
It also makes the stakes seem pretty thin, especially for a story in which the very future of humanity is at stake.
Wearing a retro New York Yankees ball cap, repairing drones with chewing gum and reminiscing about the great finish of the 2017 Super Bowl — a last-minute Hail Mary pass thrown to a thirdstring receiver — Jack is a hero for both our time and theirs, but he’s mostly just Tom Cruise, left with nothing much to play but his usual energetic earnestness.
It’s up to him to discover what’s going on, which he appears to, but he’s not very good at sharing it. What’s that Elysian paradise by the lake, for instance? Where does the food come from in his iPod house? And what’s a third-string receiver doing on the field for the last play of the Super Bowl?
Morgan Freeman is also in the movie, wearing dark glasses and providing much well-articulated exposition that doesn’t really clarify things but at least sounds authoritative.
Like the rest of Oblivion, you can’t talk about his role at the risk of giving too much away. The studio has asked reviewers not to reveal the surprises, and I’d never do that, even if I could figure out what they were.