Review: Oblivion ★★★

Oblivion is another crack at the sci-fi whip for Joseph Kosinski, who’s attempted rebooting of the Tron franchise in TRON: Legacy was flawed and not particularly well received. Oblivion is a better film and a step forward for Kosinski but it is far from perfect.

The film is set sixty years after an alien invasion that left Earth uninhabitable, in the year 2077. The human race is living in limbo on a space station, preparing to evacuate to a nearby moon. The film centers around two technicians still remaining on Earth, Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) and Victoria (Andrea Riseborough), who have had their memory wiped pre-mission so they will get the job done effectively. The ‘effective team’ maintains the drones protecting the resource gathering machines that are sucking the earth dry. Shortly before the mission can be accomplished, a spacecraft from before the war crashes whilst Jack is on Earth. The craft contains a woman haunting Jack’s dreams (Olga Kurylenko), and Jack soon starts to realise that things are not all that they seem to be and that maybe he’s been following orders a little too readily. The story was born out of a graphic novel penned by Kosinski himself, that he started back in 2005. The rights to turn the novel into a screenplay, having been given up by Disney for its inability to acquire a PG rating, were swiftly acquired by Universal.

The plot, whilst clever and enjoyable, is actually one of the film’s pitfalls, for it feels very much like major plot points have been ‘copied and pasted’ into the screenplay from classic sci-fi films. Its obvious that Kosinski’s influences have come from cult movies, such as Blade Runner, Silent Running, 2001: A Space Odyssey and there’s even traces of Star Wars. It’s so blatant at times that one can’t help but feel Kosinski lost sight of his own story. Nevertheless, the story is still an enjoyable ride purely because of its classic influences. It also allows for Tom Cruise to partake in spaceship dogfights and manly interchanges with drones and Scavs (the aliens still on Earth), which he executes with true Tom Cruise professionalism.

Oblivion does lack rich characters, which is a massive shame, and often the relationships between the actors are a little stale. Andrea Riseborough is the one exception to this statement, who brings a real fullness to Victoria. Her character is living in conscious ignorance of the suspicious nature of their existence on Earth and Riseborough is wholly convincing.

However, what Kosinski has done is create one of the most visually impressive films of recent years. Partially shot in Iceland and coupled with CGI effects, Oblivion looks every bit the alien wasteland it is trying to portray. It’s a majestic visual display from Kosinski and the rumours that he will be consulted on the upcoming Star Wars reboot are all the more exciting having seen the Lucas-esque visual style that he brought to this film. 

On the whole, Oblivion was enjoyable and the visual effects were completely worth the two hours spent watching it. The fairly hollow characters were easy to overlook because of how visually impressive it was. The supporting cast of Morgan Freeman and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Game of Thrones) are more than capable of delivering solid acting performances, and the story was completely acceptable as homage to the classics of the sci-fi genre, even it was slightly over-exuberant.