★★★
Bad notices aside, I enjoyed this film. Visuals count, and there’s a lot of pleasure
to be had from soaking up what’s on the screen.
From the clean look of the sky home where Jack and Vika live to NYC
ruins like the public library and the Empire State Building, there’s most
always something worth looking at in Oblivion. Desolate
scenes are empty, and panoramas have expanse, even when there’s a monster of a
mechanism looming far away. The movie also
has an engaging tone of Romantic nostalgia for a lost civilization, similar to
that in WALL-E, with Jack Harper as the last man on earth, left to maintain a
few machines, sift through damaged artifacts of the lost culture, and engage
his fantasies of what life must have been like.
All this makes for a good sci-fi movie, and if there’s the occasional
Star Wars-inspired chase through a narrow canyon or struggle with a
sophisticated version of Hal, so much the better.
There’s even enough suspense to hold our attention as we go
through a series of surprises. We
discover, for example, that our Moon-inspired maintenance man has an little
refuge in an area of rich greenery, and soon afterwards, we face the mystery of
why the Scavs want to capture Jack rather than eliminate him in the library
scene. And before we linger on that
point too long, a signal mysteriously comes from the Empire State ruins, a ship
with a human crew lands, drones attack the crew, and Jack and a new character, Julia,
end up with the Scavs. The story
continues to move quickly all the way through the big clone reveal, another
salute to Moon, and on to the counter-attack against the Tet. I enjoyed the ongoing narrative springs
through the film.
Oblivion even gives us something of a sci-fi thematic question in
the second part of the film: What does identity consist of? In all the film’s loss and nostalgia, we
discover that Jack 49 looks exactly like his clone, Jack 52, so 52 would
logically have the same memories as 49;
however, memory scrub aside, it’s by no means clear that they share the dreams of their wife, Julia, or that both have their
wilderness homestead. With this same-but-different twist, the plot gets a little unstable. And what’s more, Oblivion goes on to propose that Jack
49 can die while destroying the Tet – thus widowing his wife – but that Jack 52
can then replace 49 as the husband back on earth. It’s a classic sci-fi conundrum to ponder if a bit creaky.
Oblivion offers some sci-fi satisfaction to fans of the
genre, and there are good images and some narrative energy. It’s not a bad way to spend a couple of hours
in front of the screen.
