In “Oblivion,” Tom Cruise plays a post-apocalyptic handyman who listens to ’60s tunes, hangs around on a space station and lovingly brings an Earth plant to his girlfriend. So “Top Gun” has become “Wall-E.”
At least Cruise does get to fly around an aircraft again: With its round twin gun turrets and a narrow cockpit in between, it looks like a funny nose and glasses, or possibly an intergalactic brassiere. So maybe think of him as Maverick-E.
It’s 2077, 60 years since Earth was destroyed when a foul breed of mysterious alien attackers called the Scavengers, or Scavs, destroyed the moon, which unleashed tsunamis and earthquakes that half-wrecked our planet. Then humankind, in fighting back, ruined the other half with a nuclear war.
But all of this is just an excuse for New York landmarks to be trashed again: The Manhattan Bridge and the Empire State Building get mostly buried, and the filmmakers can’t resist the clichés of the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge, so they don’t. Also, the hero has vague flashbacks of repressed memories and there’s an all-controlling force sometimes represented by an evil glowing eye.
Wait a minute. You say I am having Total Recall of the Legend of the Planet of the Apes: A Space Odyssey? Then you’re beginning to think exactly like a successful hack screenwriter. Watch a few movies (skip the nonfamous ones), scramble the bits together, dream up $200 million worth of effects, and you’ve got something you can “pitch” to execs who have seen exactly the same movies (and not many others). Both you and the execs are in full agreement that originality requires too much work.
Not that “Oblivion” isn’t kind of fun; there are lots of zippy flying scenes and an adequate quantity of shootouts. Simply counting up the various rip-offs is a fun drinking game, and the effects look cool, or at least costly. There’s an eerie blue-gray glow to space-station scenes, which feature clinically minimalist interiors with a design that suggests Steve Jobs will be back by 2067 — and no longer confined to just one planet.
On this space station, just outside the Earth’s atmosphere, that Jack Harper (Cruise) shares with his partner/lover Victoria (Andrea Riseborough), she is the liaison with Mission Control. (The boss is played by Melissa Leo, who does a showy and pointless regional accent.)
Jack, meanwhile, is out locating and fixing up armed drones that protect the mother ship from those rogue predators the Scavs. The drones turn out to be disappointingly poorly made: Your average Roomba is more menacing. (Their shoddiness suggests that, like Apple, Microsoft will also always be around, forever promising to get it right in the next generation.)
Each of these robo-sentries is built with an exposed dinner plate-sized “Shoot Me Anywhere But Here!” target that, when hit, causes instant destruction. Were these things designed by the same guy who built the Death Star? Also, when they’re about to unleash half a dozen huge machine guns on you, the drones sometimes pause, lip-smackingly, to savor the moment, which to the untrained eye looks an awful lot like these machines are just waiting for someone to sneak up behind and shoot them. Additional problem: Drones can be distracted by yelling, “Hey!”
In two weeks, Jack and Victoria are due to join the rest of humanity in the new colony on Saturn moon Titan, but you kinda sorta get the feeling they’re never going to get there. Jack is plagued by dreams that feel almost like memories of a meeting atop the Empire State Building with a mystery girl (Olga Kurylenko). And the lead Scav (Morgan Freeman, who looks fairly badass in a black cape), has other plans for Jack.
As directed by Joseph Kosinski (“Tron”), “Oblivion” is one of those movies in which the main source of interest is simply in figuring out what’s actually going on, though when you do, your reaction is bound to be a shrug. Without an exceptionally skilled director of actors (such as Cameron Crowe), Cruise can’t dial up much emotion, so the two love interests for his character are two more than he can convincingly handle. He may be at home in the cockpit of a killing machine, but when it comes to displaying his humanity, he’s no Wall-E.