Oblivion

Yesterday evening, Hannah and Andy and I took Arya-Rose (see Ersatz Dad) to the cinema to see Oblivion. Well, we took her to the cinema and Oblivion was what we saw; we weren't specifically seeking to introduce her to the oeuvre of Tom Cruise, but that's a matter for a different blog. This one is about the movie.

So, first a few obvious points: 1) It's loud, and 2) it's beautiful. It was based on an unpublished comic book, and it shows; the visual aesthetic of the film is its strongest point, creating the vast and bleakly beautiful post-post-apocalyptic world in which the last two humans on Earth monitor and repair drones, menaced by the remains of an alien army in the aftermath of an interplanetary war. The clear demarcation between the ruin of the Earth and the shining whiteness of Jack and Victoria's sky house, bubblecraft (a nifty little flying machine), drones and other tech is superbly realised.

The landscapes are big, and so are the soundscapes. The drones boom like enraged bears and the bubblecrafts' engines cry like eagles, while every gunshot hammers at the senses like thunder. Hannah had a hand over Arya's ear for much of the film, but the noise never phases her, nor to do her hearing any harm.

Tom Cruise is on pretty good form, with his smirking well in hand, and Morgan Freeman is solid support in a glorified cameo. Nikolaj Coster-Woldau left me asking 'is that Jaime Lannister?' halfway through the film, but cemented his chops for playing good-looking hardarses. This leaves the female leads, and to discuss those I kind of have to go into spoiler mode, beginning the paragraph after next.

Andrea Riseborough plays Victoria, Jack's partner, in all senses, although he is distracted from that by his memories; apparently of a woman on Earth before the war, before he was born. Olga Kurylenko is the other woman, Julia, who falls out of the sky about halfway through the film and thus sets off the rising action.

It emerges, signposted earlier in the film by the inconsistencies in Jack's history and the fact of his erased memory, that Jack and Victoria are clones, unwittingly doing the work of the aliens, with the original Jack's memories breaking through, but Victoria holding to her 'programme'. Victoria is cool, almost mechanical; even her quiet passion for Jack is more about their team bonding than romance (indeed, she rejects his spontaneous gestures). She is 'unreal', while Jack is clone, but becoming real, and Julia is human all the way through. Unfortunately, Kurylenko is not the actor that Riseborough is; indeed, neither is Cruise, which undercuts the themes of the film somewhat as the characters show depth of emotion in inverse proportion to their ascribed 'soulfulness'.

All in all, I can safely say that I enjoyed the film. It wasn't perfect, but I'm prepared to cut it some slack just for not being a sequel or a remake. I would also be interested to see the comic, which if it matches the visuals of the film would be something akin to the awesomely beautiful and frustratingly occasional Gone With the Blastwave.