Oblivion

It is the year 2077, and Tech 49 Jack Harper is one of the last people on Earth. There has been an alien invasion by the mysterious"Scavs", and although humans won the war, the Earth was ruined. So most of humanity is on a colony on Titan, powered by giant machines in what's left of the oceans that convert sea water into fusion power. Jack and his partner Victoria are a maintenance team who keep drone robots running to guard the machines against the few remaining "Scav" bandits left. They report to Sally, the mission controller who is aboard the "Tet": a giant tetrahedral orbiting the Earth.
    Jack and Victoria's memories have been wiped out 5 years ago for security reasons, but Jack is having dreams he thinks are memories from before the war. They only have 2 more weeks before they are to leave, but Jack is not as enthusiastic to leave. But when a pre-war NASA ship crashes to Earth, and Jack saves a crew member named Julia, all Hell breaks loose. It starts a series of events that makes Jack question what he thinks he knows and starts him on a journey to find the truth.

Cast

Tom Cruise as Commander Jack Harper
Andrea Riseborough as Victoria Olsen
Morgan Freeman as Malcolm Beech
Olga Kurylenko as Julia Rusakova


Who will like this:

I describe this movie as an adult Wall-E mixed with The Matrix, Independence Day and Total Recall (the original). Confused? I know. This is a very intricate movie plot that cannot be summed up very easily. It watches like more of a series than a stand alone movie. The reason for this may be because it is based on an unpublished graphic novel by the same name from Joseph Kosinski, who wrote, produced and directed this film. It's part sci-fi, part romance drama and part action film.

Phantom Thoughts

Strap yourself in. This is going to be a long one. No. I'm not talking about my thoughts, I'm talking about this movie. It's over two and a half hours and it FEELS like it. It's not that it was boring...it's that there is a LOT going on. Maybe too much, which is why it didn't do as well as it could have.
     I kinda liked it though. Some of it was a bit predictable, but for the most part it kept my interest. It may be a slow start, but getting a feel of the backstory was a necessary element to moving forward. But let's talk about why I used the movie references I did in the above section:

    An adult Wall-E? Yeah. The drones that Jack is in charge of fixing are very reminiscent of the white robots from the Pixar movie. I can't be sure, but this may be left over from when Disney had the rights to this movie. They later dropped it and Universal picked it up.

     The Matrix. Here's some SPOILER for the rest of the review. The same way that Neo is living in a dream world and finds out what reality REALLY is, Jack finds out that the humans didn't really win the war. In the Matrix, humans scorched the sky as a last ditch effort/ after the Moon is destroyed and causes havoc on the environment  humans use their nukes as a last ditch effort. Neo finds out that he was not the first "One"/ Jack finds out that he is one of thousands of clones the aliens are using to harvest the Earth's resources.

Independence Day. This is mostly referring to the end sequence of each movie. Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith take an alien spaceship into the mothership of the aliens and blow them up with a nuke. Tom Cruise and Morgan Freeman fly their ship into the "Tet" (which looks a LOT like the mothership in ID) and blow it up with a bomb of their own.

     Total Recall. Quaid finds out that the woman he thought was his wife is actually a spy that tries to kill him once he finds out the truth. He then turns to the underworld of Mars who help him. Jack finds that his wife is actually the crash survivor Julia who has been in cryogenic sleep for 60 years. When his partner/girlfriend finds out, she tries to kill him as well. Jack turns to the humans who are masquerading as aliens to show him the truth and he helps them defeat the real aliens.

So now do you get it? I hope so. With everything I have described, there's STILL a lot more I haven't even gotten into here.

Until next time, see you in the center seat.