Relentless Bombardment: Part I Oblivion Review – Twisted Hymn

Relentless Bombardment: Part I Oblivion Review – Twisted Hymn

June 8, 2013 § Leave a Comment

Relentless Bombardment: Oblivion, Iron Man 3, The Great Gatsby, Star Trek – Into Darkness, and the Spring Ramp Up to Hollywood’s Summer ‘13

(– ***Spoilers For All The Above*** –)

W.B. Preston

Part I: Oblivion – Twisted Hymn

     So I never intended on seeing any of these movies. Yet I had them graciously thrust upon me by friends and family, so I’ve decided to write something about my experience of the ramp up to Hollywood’s Summer ’13. My immediate impression to all of these movies was to convulse wildly in response to the relentless bombardment to my senses. The editing technique of this twenty-first century New-Wave or the era of Action Hollywood has never been better. Or should I say more efficient.

The lens is never allowed to linger for very long, and an explosion of angles and perspectives infiltrate my retina in rapid procession. Not even in the expansive lingering desert scenes of Oblivion – (Joseph Kosinski, Tom Cruise) are we allowed to take a moment to reflect, nor is the lens allowed to remain on any one subject for more than a few seconds. Rather the shots merely seem to linger in comparison to the rest of this film and its pre-Summer ’13 brethren. The film is actually quite contemplative, or the material suggests a certain contemplative attitude at some level in the creative process. The final product is in some sort of wavering opinion of itself. Unsure if it is as smart as the various films it borrows from. If the writers (Joseph Kosinski, Karl Gadjusek, Michael Arndt, Michael deBruyn) had ventured on with their own story they might have made a film to rival those great Science Fiction classics. This will be a theme found throughout all four of these Spring 13’ blockbuster films.

There is much to admire in Oblivion in fact, Andrea Riseborough as Victoria for one gives a memorable performance. She is chilly, and distant, cold and isolated, yet always seeking Jack’s affections, just as a once jealous lover who successfully wooed the source of her passions would be. Perhaps her frozen exterior hints at something to be revealed later in the plot. She is robotic and alien, an abominable android, yearning for something that no longer exists, and perhaps never did. Her eyes in the final moments before she dies are full. Risenborough’s eyes are full in every scene. Full of what, I cannot always tell, but whatever the emotion, she at least attempts to portray it.

Tom Cruise on the other hand seems hell-bent on creating character after character as the same man. Which is the plot of the movie. He is the last man, the omega man ad infinitum. The aliens have cloned Jack and Victoria, and spread them across the globe monitoring and securing a system of drones and water collectors. Mostly Cruise wonders around earth for the first 20 minutes fixing stuff and gazing into the distance in awe, or something resembling awe, a kind of confusion, which is not off par with Cruise. Or he is busy having daydreams about Julia (Olga Kurylenko) of which are impossible because they take place during a time when the earth had not been destroyed during the war with the aliens. Now the population lives in orbiting space ships, and Jack and Victoria are monitoring water retrieval for the surviving population of earth.

Yes it is all very complex and filled to the brim with ideas and material and strange science fiction images and devices to the hilt. Yet none of the themes can be fully explored, the ideas are hinted at but ultimately unfulfilled. – The loneliness of a dead planet, the longing for a distant past and reveling in the items from a forgotten time. – Led Zeppelin is in constant rotation on my ipod, so I can relate to the motif of idealization of the past. However there is no confrontation and no connecting of this idea with the characters or the plot. Its just kind of there, on Jack’s hat, the same hat from War of the Worlds? Or perhaps in the rubbled stadium from which Jack tells his rousing story of a heroic sporting event. A moment lifted by MiB3 no doubt, but also put to better use there. I suppose this longing is objectified and personified in Julia, but she does not seem lost in this new future, she seems robotic and unaffected. More concerned with Jack’s recognition of the past than with what the world has become.

At the center is Jack. He must face himself and own up to being the last man. He must destroy the machine that duplicates his likeness, over and over and over again, bombarding the planet with the same Tom Cruise again and again. In the process of killing the alien machine, he destroys himself, and all his future selves. Though he is not the last man on Earth. There is a band of resourceful Natives, hidden amongst the ruins of a defeated civilization. They are led by an old black man named Beech played by Morgan Freeman. He has been waiting for a Tom Cruise like Jack to be filled with doubt and remember enough about his past to throw off his chains held by the alien overlords and help the rebellion stop the draining of the planet. That’s right, Jack was really the bad guy all along.
This reveal is not handled with great gusto or showmanship, as with the rest of the film, and with a few other anticlimactic reveals in the other films of this Spring season. Kosinski is almost too subtle in his handling of his material here. It is rather drab and sparse with its action beats, almost uneventful. It’s like an exercise rather than a visual expression of art. The few scenes that have a visual flare involve the landscapes of Earth, or the alien machine at the end. A scene while confusing and strangely shot and edited, is as interesting a scene as you’re likely to find anywhere this year. There are many gorgeous shots of nature and the variety of Earth’s environments that serve as backdrops behind the vehicle Jack travels in.

He who was once the villain can be redeemed, with repentance and sacrifice; what turns out to be the ultimate sacrifice for Jack. He must destroy his creator. His creator is simultaneously his commander and his warden. His God and his Satan. He is the one that gives him infinite life as well as the one that damns him to a life of repetition and infinite betrayal. Jack is charged with destroying the world and sucking it dry of all its resources. And for his services he will live forever, although in many different bodies. He is given a wife and shelter, and a cool flying vehicle, and weapons to shoot things too.

The obvious biblical overtones, or anti-biblical depending on your perspective, are exemplified in the one-man one-woman imagery, as well as the empty earth, untouched by man, or once touched by man but now cleansed from his sinful pride and hubris. This is a twisted hymn. With Jack, Tom Cruise, as both anti-Christ and messiah. He is a fallen angel, whose task is the extermination of what is left of the human population. Yet his chance encounter with Beech persuades him to rebel against his creator.

However it is not only the plight of humanity that dissuades Jack from helping the Alien-Machine-Deity complete its plan of total human destruction. It takes another fallen angel, an embodiment of his connection to a past earth and his nostalgia for a dead civilization. Julia is his wife from the past; she has been orbiting the earth for the interim between Earth’s destruction and this current form of Jack and his awakening. She along with several other of Jack’s cryogenically frozen and sleeping crew members from his past life have crash landed on Earth just outside of Jack’s supervisory boundaries. This crash was orchestrated by Beech and the surviving human clan, in hopes that this current incarnation of Jack would find and save his past wife, be filled with inquiry, and rebel against his creator. Yes it is convoluted, but also very interesting.

Beech is banking on Jack’s nostalgia for the past to inspire him to keep searching for the truth and eventually fight for the rebellion. It’s a long shot, but faith is a requirement for achievement, and a cornerstone to any religious myth. And this is most definitely at least inspired by religious stories. With that said, the awakening of sleeping pod people will pop up later on in the spring ramp up to Summer ’13. This sort of post-apocalyptic, after Revelations story is not new amongst science fiction and Hollywood, yet now that we are actually living in this time, it seems there is an uncertainty, a kind of grasping for the past, a nostalgia for a simpler forgotten Armageddon. It’s become quaint to depict the end of civilization. The bleakness and solitude of this prophesized vision of the Earth will be in sharp contrast to the other films on this list. Though the theme of humanity threatened runs throughout all four.

Jack’s ultimate sacrifice, in which he kills himself in order to kill his creator and humanity’s destroyer the alien computer, is made digestible by having the other Jack that the protagonist-Jack met in the desert, marry his wife and help raise his child. Setting up a world in which there are many other Jacks, whom all can be played by Tom Cruise forever. A sequel perhaps, where an evil Jack is trying to kill all the other Jacks in order to usurp their powers ala Jet Li in The One? The possibilities are endless and as infinite as Jack, and the standard Tom Cruise action vehicles that he will star in. Up next, Tom Cruise as Tom Cruise in All You Need Is Kill.

Oblivion is a vast improvement over Tron: Legacy,  Kosinski’s first film, a film I happened to quite enjoy actually, A bit more than most it would seem. However it had many scenes that were poorly executed and strangely paced, his second outing proves to be far more cohesive and consistent, however it still suffers from odd tonal shifts and disorienting action beats. The ‘strange’ factor kept me interested till the end, I was left wondering what exactly I had just watched.
Parts of it are not unlike Twilight Zone, with the strange and ethereal Victoria as the uptight housewife, and the eerie atmosphere draped over those early suburban establishing scenes. To the frozen electronic boss Sally played by Melissa Leo. There is much here that can be mined for future Science Fiction writers. Perhaps Kosinski himself can take some of the successful themes that the film can only hint at and try to focus on them in the graphic novel.

This film is beautiful to looks at, and the CGI is seamlessly integrated in virtually every shot where it is utilized. Really outstanding work done by the photographer (Claudio Miranda), as well as the entire visual and special effects teams. And of course M83’s score or one half of M83, is encompassing, yet never quite rises to the heights of insanity and beauty of their albums.

2.5 out of 5 stars

Up next –

Relentless Bombardment:

Part II: Iron Man 3 – Bullets and Tanks