Oblivion: Flawed but Enjoyable Near-Future Sci-Fi

 

Although I love most science fiction, my favorite is near-future sci-fi set on a recognizable Earth, so I eagerly anticipated the release of Oblivion.  It has received a lot of attention from science fiction fans because it's a rare instance of an original sci-fi movie that wasn't adapted from a novel, comic, or video game or an entry in a famous franchise. Unfortunately, it wasn't as good as I'd hoped, but I still left the theater happy.

 

It's set in 2077, after a war between humans and a race of aliens.  The aliens first softened up the humans by destroying the moon and letting natural disasters wreck the planet.  Then they invaded. Humans were ultimately able to defeat them, but only by using nuclear weapons, leaving Earth uninhabitable.  Most of the population has moved either to a space station or a colony on Saturn's moon Titan, but small teams have stayed behind to oversee the harvesting of Earth's remaining water. The story revolves around Jack Harper who works as a technician servicing the drones that protect the harvesting machines from the remaining aliens, referred to as "Scavs."  While he's out on a mission to locate missing drones, a space ship crashes, and he's able to save one member of the crew, a woman named Julia, who had been appearing in his recurring dream and who causes him to question everything he knows about Earth's recent history and his own identity.

 

Oblivion tells an engaging story, and the settings alone made the viewing experience worthwhile for me.  Most of the action occurs in post-apocalypse New York, so we get to watch Harper riding his motorcycle over the remains of the Brooklyn Bridge and flying his ship over the ruins of Manhattan. He explores sunken buildings looking for missing drones and wanders through a ruined football stadium. Outside the city, he even finds a fully-furnished lake house surrounded by lush greenery where he goes to relax.

 

Although Harper enjoys his work as a drone tech, his nights are made restless by dreams of meeting Julia at a set of coin-operated binoculars on top of the Empire State Building.  All of his pre-invasion memories have been erased as a matter of national security, and the dreams lead him to wonder about his lost memories.  When he finds Julia amid the wreckage of the space ship, he realizes he has been dreaming of an event that actually occurred.  Predictably, Harper and Julia were romantically involved in the past, and their story is the movie's biggest flaw: it's overplayed.  Director Joseph Kosinski doesn't trust that viewers will remember the coin-operated binoculars, so he shows them what seems like a dozen times. He sends Harper and Julia to the ruins of the Empire State Building to reveal the exact nature of their relationship and then they fly off to the lake house for an overnight getaway.  All of this might have worked in a longer movie where everything was more developed, but it just left me annoyed and wanting Kosinski to get on to the good stuff.  

 

Because he wastes so much time on the love story, more interesting aspects of Oblivion are left underdeveloped.  While searching for a missing drone, Harper and Julia meet a large group of humans who have been living underground since the invasion, but although they end up playing a central role in the film's plot, Kosinski reveals very little about these people or how they have been surviving underground.  Moreover, the plot is also unnecessarily convoluted.  Kosinski reveals the truth about Harper's missing memories in a way that leaves viewers confused for most of the movie's second act.

 

Despite these problems, however, it is worth bearing with the muddled narrative.  When it finally begins to make sense, what initially seems like a fairly pedestrian humans vs. aliens scenario becomes a much more interesting story about humanity's struggle to survive a confrontation with an advanced alien race that uses its superior technology in devious ways. Moreover, despite a final cheesy scene in the lake house, Kosinski does bring Oblivion to a satisfying conclusion. 

 

At times, it had me thinking of Len Wiseman's Total Recall remake, which, despite its many flaws, handles its love story much more effectively by developing it in the brief pauses between action sequences.  Granted, Wiseman is also too busy having his characters being chased to slow down and reveal anything about them, and like, Kosinski, leaves his film's most interestings elements underdeveloped.  Cheesy love stories and endless chase sequences are equally nauseating, but Wiseman left me feeling a bit sicker than Kosinski, who at least tried something original and made an effort to develop his characters.  I'm hoping, however, that this summer's other big sci-fi movies will be much lighter on the chases and romance.