Movie of the week: Oblivion

There are a few sequences in Oblivion that have a comptroller on Earth receiving instructions from a superior officer off-planet. As in so many movies in which such instructions are given, military-style, the comptroller’s repeated reply is: “Copy that … Copy that …”

 It feels as though that could be a motto, or at least an echoing refrain, for Oblivion — on the basis of the concepts that feed into its storyline, at least. You could easily imagine some high-powered Hollywood producer-director watching a range of science-fiction movies and telling the scriptwriter sitting at his elbow: “Copy that … Copy that …”

Earth has been devastated — you could copy that from a number of movies. Most of humanity has been moved off-planet (copy that from Wall-E), but there are two humans who remain to do some basic maintenance (Wall-E does that, too, but of course he’s a robot). They are there to do upkeep on various instruments left on Earth to harness natural resources for the use of humanity, now living on one of Saturn’s moons, and to defend that machinery from the “Scavs”, which is short for scavengers — alien creatures living in the wasteland (see Mad Max).

The team members have had their memories erased (Total Recall) for security reasons, which sounds a bit like something South Africa’s minister of security might contemplate.

Tom Cruise, playing the male half of the maintenance and defence team, spends a fair amount of time wandering or zooming over this devastated Earth, though mostly he seems to end up in New York, so we can see how interestingly ruined it is. Copy that from Planet of the Apes (the semi-submerged Statue of Liberty), and scenes such as Cruise biking over a half-buried Brooklyn Bridge, plus other bits of ruined cityscape, from I Am Legend. From The Day after Tomorrow, copy the idea of a scene set in a destroyed Library of Congress.

Here, though, Cruise’s character rescues a little volume of Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome rather than a Gutenberg Bible. This is useful because Macaulay’s heroic poem provides him with a few lines of repeatable (and rhyming) encouragement, and because to lift the Gutenberg Bible out of a hole in the roof of the Library of Congress would probably need a decent-sized winch. (Cruise’s character is fortunate, too, to open the Lays at precisely the place where its most famously quotable lines are — he doesn’t even have to read the whole thing.)

One can always have fun playing this kind of spot-the-reference game, and when it comes to Oblivion I could mention a few more, but that may entail some spoilers. And, interestingly enough, all this copying from or echoing of other movies does not in fact make Oblivion a dully derivative film. Perhaps the kinds of science-fiction and fantasy movies we’ve seen a lot of lately are all equally derivative, and it just depends on how well the creative minds behind such a project can reshuffle and rework the elements so that it feels fresh.

In the case of Oblivion, the chief creative mind is surely writer-director Joseph Kosinski, whose only previous movie-directing project was Tron: Legacy. He is also, by the way, working on a sequel to that, but it’s bound to be less interesting than Oblivion, which was his own original idea. It has been reported that the movie is based on his graphic novel, but that’s not quite right: he developed a treatment of the idea, a “pitch kit” as he puts it, in the form of an “illustrated novel”. So, basically, he had an outline of the story and a lot of lovely images to show what the movie could look like. This is the notion that attracted Cruise.

It all works pretty well, though I note that in the original images for Oblivion the techie who moves about Earth doing the upkeep has a sort of full-body suit as well as a helmet that keeps his head covered — very Judge Dredd. Obviously, though, for the movie itself there was little chance of Cruise keeping that famous (and beloved by some) face under a helmet for any length of time.

Whatever you feel about Cruise, and whether or not you wish to gaze upon his face, Oblivion is very watchable. It is plotted with considerable ingenuity, which is more than can be said for the bulk of such movies nowadays, and the action keeps coming at regular intervals. The sentimental stuff is there, of course, to make it feel like it has to do with people’s feelings and the future of humanity and all that, but really that’s just an excuse to create this exciting new ivory-coloured world and to engineer the scenarios that drive the movie.

Drive on, I say, and don’t spare the drones.