I’ll forgive a lot for an IMAX film shot in 4K resolution with a ridiculously dramatic M83 score featuring panoramic vistas of Iceland that I can watch without shitty 3D glasses, but the surprise of Oblivion is that there wasn’t that much to forgive (though the score is pretty overbearing at times). Other than Tom Cruise’s creepy hairless torso, and the fact that every woman in the future seems to be a supermodel who wants to fling herself at Tom Cruise’s creepy, hairless, 20-years-older torso, it’s actually an artful mish-mash of older sci-fi that borrows from just enough sources that it doesn’t feel like a ripoff. It succeeds on the strength of cinematography, character design, and careful withholding of information. It leaves you feeling confused until the very end, much like my lovemaking, and when it finally lays its cards on the table, it feels like it actually had something to say. Or at least, something to say other than “thanks for the 15 dollars, sucker!”

Tom Cruise plays Jack Harper, because “Jack” is to action film heroes what “Madison” is to yuppies, but even the genericness of his name is partially explained later by a clever script. Cruise is part of a “mop-up crew,” a two-person team consisting of Cruise and a hot redhead played by Andrea Riseborough, who live a sick sky-flat with a heated pool and modernist platform bed high above a post-apocalyptic Earth, whose job it is to do maintenance work on series of droids that protect giant, seawater-fed reactors that power the new human colony on Titan, a moon of Saturn. The droids protect the reactors from “Scavs,” the remnants of an alien race that lost a war to the humans, though the Earth was rendered mostly uninhabitable in the process. (*deep breath*) OR SO TOM CRUISE AND THIS REDHEAD BROAD HAVE BEEN TOLD.

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It’s been almost three years since Inception came out, but you’d never know it by this week’s trailers, which are still helping Hollywood’s BRAAAAHM sound operators earn record profits. Didn’t Eisenhower try warn us about the burgeoning BRAAAAHM-sound industrial complex? I fear this has grown beyond our control.

Oblivion, from Tron Legacy director Joseph Kosinski, looks like the kind of sci-fi movie designed for people who thought Looper wasn’t “space-y” or “future-y” enough (not that there’s anything wrong with that). It stars Tom Cruise as a droid maintenance man from a future human colony in space, who spends his days cleaning up the now-uninhabitable surface of the Earth. That is, until ONE DAY (*record scratch) he finds out, surprise surprise, there are still some people down there, and their thetan levels are off the charts. So Cruise orders up some personality tests, hooks everyone to e-meters, and gets them all to help make a recruitment video starring Will Smith’s kids. The video converts the whole galaxy and they all live happily ever after in a psychiatrist-free utopia ruled by Emperor Danny Masterson.

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Sprightly Jack Reacher Tom Cruise plays a new Jack – Jack Harper, because all action-movie protagonists are named Jack – in Oblivion, a sci-fi film from Tron Legacy director Joseph Kosinski, based on his own comic book and adapted by a committee of screenwriters including William Monahan and Michael Arndt. Set in the FUTURE, after a DESTRUCTIVE WAR has pushed humans into a colony in the SKY, Cruise plays a DRONE REPAIRMAN sent to explore THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH, where he finds a group of SURVIVING HUMANS, which leads him to question EVERYTHING HE’S BEEN TOLD. Oops, sorry about the capitalization there, I thought we were playing sci-fi mad-libs.

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Okay, so the bad news is that this story is about Tom Cruise.  The good news is that it involves a sci-fi project that isn’t a sequel or a remake.  Joseph Kosinski’s first feature was Tron Legacy for Disney. He had another project called Horizon set up there, but Disney wouldn’t do it unless it was PG rather than PG-13.  Now, Variety reports that Universal is close to picking it up with Tom Cruise still attached to star.

Story takes place in an apocalyptic future where most of the population lives in clouds above an earth surface that is now uninhabitable. An earthbound soldier, repairing drones that patrol and blast a savage alien life form, encounters a beautiful woman who crashed in a craft that forces him to question his world view. [Variety]

Just one question about this barren wasteland, mysterious beautiful plane crash lady: will there be gays in there?  Anyway, while I’m no fan of Tom Cruise, I must admit that he does do his best work in sci-fi (Minority Report).  Especially if it’s set in some futuristic space society which has evolved beyond the point of recognizable human feelings and emotions. That seems to be Scientology’s end game.

[picture source: Radar]

[Update, Monday 12/20: Reposting this for anyone who saw it over the weekend and wants to weigh in about what a dumbass I am in the comments.]

It’s been a long time since I saw a movie and was as excited to rush home and write about it as I was with Tron Legacy.  Granted, one of the driving motivations in my life is having legitimate complaints to express, so take that for the backhanded compliment it is.  Tron Legacy: thought provoking, but to a greater extent, complaint provoking.

You know the story: Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) is the glib, rebellious heir to a Microsoft-like software company who blows off steam by riding a motorcycle Ducati™ and BASE jumping (seriously, base jumping, like five minutes in). Sam, let’s call him Sarcastic Batman, clashes with the chairman of the board, who, like Steve Jobs, wants his software kept tightly under wraps, whereas Sam thinks information should be free, like baby ducks.  That’s the way it was intended by Sam’s father Jeff Bridges, who’s been missing for 20 years.  One night after one of Sam’s clever pranks and BASE jumping stunts, Bruce Boxleitner (awesome porn name, btw) shows up at Sam’s Lethal Weapon-esque loner condo — you know the type, in the middle of the city, yet somehow totally isolated with its own boat dock and a motorcycle in the house. Bruce bears a mysterious page from Dad’s old number, which has been disconnected for 20 years. He tosses Sam the keys to Pops’ warehouse and urges him to investigate, which  Sam has apparently spent the intervening two decades not doing. Sam heads to the warehouse, the last place his dad was seen, which apparently no one has thought to search after he disappeared. Blah blah blah, Sam gets sucked into the computer.  Let’s be honest, none of us really cared about the set up.

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