If watching Tom Cruise look at pretty things sounds like it’s worth a $12 ticket, see Oblivion. Otherwise, steer clear.
Oblivion, despite the bleak emptiness of the title, is pure sensory bombardment.
Sitting in the theater with your head craned back and peripheral vision engulfed by a massive IMAX screen, there is nothing to do but be swallowed whole by the seizure-inducing visuals and earth shaking surround sound.
Too bad for the audience, then, that Oblivion isn’t much more than an amalgamation of predictable B-movie plot lines, strung together haphazardly by a series of ostentatious CGI explosions and some extreme close-ups of hero Jack’s (Tom Cruise, Jack Reacher) well-exfoliated face.
This isn’t to say that Oblivion can’t be a fun viewing experience. Yes, the plot holes are staggering, and yes, it’s hard to care about any of the characters, but there’s no denying the visual beauty of the film.
Director Joseph Kosinski’s previous film — and directorial debut — TRON: Legacy is in many ways an identical experience to Oblivion. Both are obnoxious, glitzy, loud and completely self-obsessed with maintaining an overproduced image.
They are undeniably fun movies to watch, but more in the way that watching a brain-dead Jean-Claude Van Damme (U.F.O.) film is fun, as opposed to a more nuanced movie from Steven Spielberg’s (Lincoln) impressive science fiction collection. (His next film? Robopocalypse, of course.)
So while the visuals in the film can be breathtaking — for instance, two lovers taking a nighttime swim in a pool thousands of feet above the earth — the pacing and plotting of Oblivion falter in many places.
The story follows Jack, who is told he is one of the last two people on Earth after a war with an alien race left the planet in environmental ruin. Everyone else has apparently colonized Saturn’s moon, Titan, leaving Jack and partner Victoria (Andrea Riseborough, Welcome to the Punch) to run maintenance on the robotic drones that protect Earth’s autonomous water-foraging operation.
It’s a mouthful, all right, and things only get more convoluted and unsatisfying from there.
The plot, in addition to being scattered and confusing, contains several twists that are unabashed ripoffs of Duncan Jones’ (Source Code) cult hit Moon, one of the most beloved sci-fi films of the past decade.
For those who have seen Moon, Oblivion feels like a retread, albeit one that replaces the former’s challenging concepts of humanity and existence with rather large explosions.
Fans of Moon — or anyone paying attention during the film’s tell-all info dumps — will see the entire narrative arc laid out before the two-hour film even gets going, which makes the awkward pacing even more unbearable as the film lumbers along from one robot battle to another.
For those who haven’t seen Moon, Oblivion’s shock-and-awe moment still doesn’t feel natural because the film lacks truly relatable characters. Cruise’s Jack is as bland a hero as they come and Victoria isn’t an interesting presence either.
Even the wily band of humans scouring the surface beg zero sympathy — the always-lovable Morgan Freeman (Olympus Has Fallen) has about 10 total minutes of screen time, which he spends saying heady nonsense the audience can’t be bothered to care about.
Oblivion is not a movie viewers watch with their brain, but with their eyes. Amid the deluge of post-apocalyptic popcorn cinema being released this year, Oblivion may not be the smartest or most original, but it sure is pretty.
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