Oblivion (2013)

Back in the 40s and 50s, a subgenre of moviemaking flourished. Cheap pictures with cheap thrills that we now refer to as “B-movies” made money at the box office from those wanting mindless, even stupid entertainment. They saw them and forgot them. Sixty years later, those movies remain largely forgotten, except for the rare venture that was cheap, but actually creative. In sixty years nobody on Earth will remember Oblivion, a perfect example of today’s B-movies, which are enormously more expensive but just as enormously stupid. It’ll probably be forgotten by the end of this year. It stars Tom Cruise as an engineer who lives on a mostly dead Earth a few decades after the moon was destroyed by some alien war. You can probably picture it now, even if you haven’t seen the advertisements. If you have, you should already know everything that happens.

I will admit that Oblivion isn’t hard on the eyes and it isn’t boring in the slightest. I certainly can’t say that my attention during the film ever waned, but in the departments of creativity and basic storytelling it falters. This movie enforces what I call circumstantial plot. I imagine the author saying, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if Tom Cruise was out in this wasteland and ended up wrestling with… himself?” and then coming up with whatever reason might possibly slide to allow this to happen, even if it doesn’t really make any sense. The story seems to be built around moments specifically included for the trailers, and there are so many holes in the film’s logic that all common sense takes a vacation. None of this hinders the movie’s success as far as “in the moment” entertainment goes, but it is pretty worthless overall. In terms of quality, it is about on par with writer and director Joseph Kosinski’s previous effort Tron: Legacy. I would say Oblivion is better in an aesthetic sense, but it seems more pathetic when considering it is based on Kosinski’s own graphic novel. That means he failed twice to tell a story that actually resembles a complete narrative thought.

I personally don’t think Oblivion has any real merit as a movie, a story, a star vehicle, an adrenaline rush, or really anything much more than an example of how to throw away $120,000,000 and still come out ahead. It is a ridiculous movie made all the more ridiculous by how seriously it is being accepted. It seems viewers will follow any pied piper away from similar movies that are actually any good if they are told to do so by an exciting commercial. Oblivion is a good looking distraction and nothing more, which might just be up your alley. I see movies in a timeline that begins with Edison’s experiments in the late 1800s and currently ends with Oblivion. When compared to all the other science fiction movies of all those decades of cinema, it just doesn’t hold its own.

5/10