Oblivion (2013)

Tom Cruise is a constant. You know what you’re going to get out of him every time he's placed in front of a camera, and what you’re going to get is often tremendously entertaining. He is a Movie Star with a capital “M” and “S,” and what's so impressive is how effortlessly he goes about it. He belongs on a film set more than just about any of his contemporaries, and he is never more comfortable than when he is kicking bad guys to pieces and cracking wise in the face of certain death, all while being as inoffensive as possible. There is a disarming sincerity to what he does, and while his film choices the last few years haven’t exactly been bold, he is the kind of actor who elevates material far more often than he hurts it. He is what he is. It’s just up to the films around him to step up to the plate. His last few movies since the awesomeness of Ghost Protocol have been a bit too content with going right down the middle, and the new science fiction thriller Oblivion is no exception. It has its moments, but ultimately it never becomes more than precisely the film you think it is going to be.

Cruise is Jack Harper, a character name that no doubt required hours and hours of focus group work. He and his partner Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) are the last two people on Earth, and it is their job to oversee that various machines around the planet are successfully extracting water from the ocean for later use on Titan, one of Saturn’s moons where the humans have built a colony. Harper is the only one of the two that actually goes down to the ground, and that is to make sure the various drones are functional. The only real danger to their well-being are a group of leftover extraterrestrials on the ground they refer to as “scavs,” which is short for scavengers. Jack and Victoria simply go about their business as they count down to the end of their time on Earth, but as you might imagine things quickly start to get a little strange as the two of them start to realize the “scavs,” and the humans' supervisor played by Melissa Leo, are not what they initially seem. This chaos is set into motion by Julia (Olga Kurylenko), a leftover human who shows up and gets Jack to start questioning everything he’s been told. Morgan Freeman and Nikolaj "Jaime Lannister" Coster-Waldau also show up.

There aren’t many original bones in Oblivion’s body. One of the biggest problems is that the broad strokes of the plot—in particular many of the twists and turns that come later—eerily resemble another science fiction film that came out a few years back. If I said the title here it would spoil Oblivion way too much, but just know that it was released in 2009 and cost about 1/24 as much as this new film. By the time the dominos start to fall in the second half, it doesn’t take the sharpest audience to get an idea of where it’s all going to head, and once it gets there it isn’t all that enthralling. Oblivion exists on the foggy line between ambitious science fiction with actual ideas and science fiction of the more explosion-y kind. When you’re walking said line it’s very important which way you go at the climax, and this film tilts decidedly in the “explosion-y” direction. The film isn’t without risks, and there are some admirably weird moments in the second half, but it doesn’t commit enough to the ideas to make the action all that powerful.

This film does represent a considerable step forward for director Joseph Kosinski, who showed some visual promise with his first film Tron: Legacy but was hampered by the fact that the material was an absolute black hole. Oblivion at least gives him something to bite into, even if some elements of the post-apocalyptic world don’t make a lot of sense. For one, Earth seems like it’s been abandoned for thousands of years rather than just a few decades, and much of the “futuristic” mise-en-scene is stuff we’ve seen in a million movies before. Kosinski was able to make an engaging enough world, and the man can skillfully put together an action sequence, but the ability to make something pop with originality still eludes him. I have no doubt he will accomplish that within his next few features. He’s got all the skill in the world.

Oblivion amounts to little more than a bunch of talented people getting together, doing their jobs perfectly well, and then clocking out at the end of the day. That’s not to say they didn’t care about what they were doing—it’s been documented that Cruise in particular does nothing but care about what he’s doing—but it’s a science fiction film that completely lacks the one of two touches it needs to go to the next level. When a film like this walks right up to the line of expectation and no further, it can be easy to forget all the good stuff it does just to get there. That’s all well and good, but as an audience there are few things more frustrating than underachievement.

Grade: C+