Oblivion Movie Review: Visually Stunning Cgi And Production Design

THE FIRST thing you notice in “Oblivion” is that its visually stunning especially when seen at IMAX, with amazing special effects, spectacular cinematography and production design, all set to fantastic electronic music. But the film has elements that merely echo past sci-films, including ‘Total Recall”, “The Matrix”, “Promotheus” and even “Resident Evil” in the thing about clones. Also set in a futuristic, post-apocalyptic world like these movies, it’s directed and co-written by Joseph Kosinski (“Tron”) who originally wrote it as a graphic novel.

Tom Cruise is Jack Harper (and he just played Jack Reacher recently), a maintenance man in the year 2077 after a war with aliens that devastated Planet Earth and destroyed our moon, sending surviving humans to move to a moon of Saturn. He’s married to Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) and they live in a beautiful outer-space home, but he has memories of another woman (Olga Kurylenko) he sees in his dreams set in New York City. His job is to do reconnaissance flights to repair or locate missing drones. When a spaceship crashes, he finally meets the girl in his dreams who helps him recall his mysterious past, also with the help of a bunch of human survivors led by Morgan Freeman.

Kosinski’s grandiose cinematic vision (a character in itself) is enough to make “Oblivion” worth watching. Tom Cruise gives a solid performance as the perplexed but likeable hero and he gets great support from everyone else, including Melissa Leo as their controller who’s only seen on a video screen. The sight of familiar Washington DC landmarks, notably the Capitol and the Obelisk (also demolished by terrorists in “Olympus Has Fallen) buried in a nuclear wasteland is reminiscent of the Statue of Liberty in the original “Planet of the Apes” with Charlton Heston. A key scene (we don’t know if this is a homage or a rip off) will also make you recall “An Affair to Remember” and “Sleepless in Seattle”.

The film opened one week earlier in Manila than in the U.S., which is good so it won’t be competing head on with the first big actioner of the U.S. summer season, “Iron Man 3”.