So, went and saw Oblivion today. I know there was a lot of bitching in this thread about the trailer giving away the plot, but I didn’t see most of the trailers or forgot most of them.
[spoiler]The first “twist given away” by the trailers - that the aliens aren’t aliens and are actually humans led by Morgan Freeman - comes up fairly early in the movie and isn’t the main twist. The backstory at the start of the movie is that Earth fought a war with aliens, and won, but destroyed the Earth in the process - so the remaining humans are all on a space station called the Tet, preparing for a move to Titan. Cruise and the redhead are one team kept on Earth to oversee the process of gathering Earth’s remaining resources for the trip.
Now, in the first five minutes of the movie, Cruise mentions the “mandatory memory wipe” - so you know, even without seeing a trailer, that Something He’s Been Told Is A Lie. Still, I was unprepared for the level of how wrong everything was - I was expecting some sort of shadowy corporation, but instead we find out that the Tet is actually an alien invader that goes from planet to planet to feed (think Mass Effect’s Reapers, or Unicron, or Galactus) and Cruise and the redhead are just one pair of many, many clones of the original Cruise/redhead, who were the first two humans to be abducted by the Tet and now being used to steal all of Earth’s resources for the Tet.[/spoiler]
Overall, I felt somewhat similarly to how I felt about Prometheus last year - it looks good and it pushes the right sci-fi buttons aesthetically, but there’s just not enough meat to the movie. Pretty much the whole film rests on figuring out the plot twist, and aside from that there’s really not much to the movie - this isn’t the sort of film you’ll watch twice. Also, a bit heavy on the romance, but calling it Oblivion: A Love Story probably wouldn’t’ve played well. Still, it’s nowhere near as dumb as Prometheus (only a few minor plotholes), so I guess it has that going for it. And it has a pretty good “last line”:
I just saw it, and I enjoyed it much more than Prometheus. I felt 5 to 15 minutes ahead of the movie at most points, but despite that it was so well made that it didn’t bother me at all. I guess it’s not a great movie, but I was very satisfied to have seen a solidly good movie.
Over all the things in the movie I found most absurd to be…
…that in just 4 short years NASA will have perfected suspended animation technology and have everything set for a manned mission to Titan. :dubious: Seriously why did they have to pick that year? And why Titan instead of Mars?
Anyway it was pretty obvious that…
…the whole “humanity’s relocated to Titan” was a lie since it’s hard to imagine how Titan could be more hospitable than Earh. Even the most barren areas we saw were friendly to humans than anywhere else in the solar system. I’m guessing the “clones” were programed not to think about that.
By the way, after the reveal that…
…Jack was “cloned” did anyone else find it hard to get the image of Tom Cruise having sex with himself out of their head? :o He may be a nutjob, but he’s still really hot for his age.
I really enjoyed this film, my family didn’t, so to each his own. It’s kind of bizarre - it tries to be more literate than many SF movies, but still has plot/logic gaps that require the viewer to turn their brains off.
I liked it that you had to piece together what was happening and there wasn’t a long expository sequence to explain What It All Meant. I had to explain it to my 11yo at the end, so that’s a good sign, imho. I’ll probably have to do the same with GF2 and Chinatown in the future.
But, let’s get to the things that make no sense… SPOILERS AHEAD
[spoiler]1. Aliens have these amazingly fluid, death-dealing probes, but they make clones of Jack to wipe out humanity? Why not use the probes?
The usual problem of “If you’re an interstellar civilization removing all the resources from planets, why don’t you just get the resources in space and not deal with those pesky gravity wells? Haven’t you guys ever heard of asteroids and comets?” cf V.
Morgan Freeman’s plan was amazingly convoluted and, like many of its kind, depended too much on random chance.
Why did the alien bother to let Jack in the hold at the end? Why did the alien allow Jack all that time to explain his character development? Why didn’t Jack and Morgan program the bomb to just explode, instead of requiring a trigger?
If you’re going to destroy the moon, and you don’t care about gravity wells, why not throw chunks of the moon at Earth to wipe out humanity instead of using, you know… an army of clones?
For 3+ years you don’t remember the other Jack that exists on the planet?[/spoiler]
Still, I gave it a 9 out of 10 - at least it tried to be something other than an action film. Sad that expectations have dropped so low, but that’s the way it is…
I enjoyed it; good but not great. Parts of the movie reminded me of Moon, Independence Day, and Wall-E, among others… but a movie doesn’t have to be original to be enjoyable (Moon is really great, by the way).
It managed to avoid the “these characters are too stupid to deserve to live” problem of Prometheus. Not that the characters were brilliant… but at least they didn’t make any cringe-inducing foolish decisions.
…I don’t think it’s that Julia forgot about Jack 52; it’s that she didn’t expect him to find the valley. She was stranded there. Come to think of it aren’t there dozens of Jack & Victorias all over the planet who don’t have a clue what happened or why they lost contact with Sally?
…We don’t really know if his interpetation of the Tet’s motivation is correct. It’s entirely possible that it’s just an advanced scout tasked with prepping the Earth for colonization. It’s still very strange that it needed copies of humans to service it’s drones, but there wouldn’t have been a movie otherwise.
Yeah, this was definitely one of the things I found to be a stretch. That and:
The 2017 Super Bowl will be won by a team playing in its own stadium? That’s never happened. Also, it seemed pretty clear that Cruise 49 was limited to the New York area, and since the 2017 SB will be in either Houston, San Fran or Miami…
#1 was by far the biggest problem I had with the film in terms of plot holes. #4 is just typical character stupidity.
Saw this tonight. I think it’s pretty much the definition of “enjoyably watchable, as long as you don’t think super hard about it”. So if that kind of movie bugs you, stay away. If not, much like Tron (same director), I thought this was absolutely worth the watch. Better than Prometheus at this time last year, IMO.
The Tet was actually mining all of Earth’s water. The coverstory from the Tet was that humanity was leaving Earth to go live on Titan. You know, where there’s a hell of a lot of water that you don’t actually have to invade a planet for. It’s like the writers never heard of the complaints about the old V show.
What the hell was up with Victoria’s eyes? In every scene her pupils were hugely dilated. My wife and I both found it incredibly distracting.
I noticed that dilation thing, too. It was so obvious it HAD to be intentional.
But yeah, interesting movie with a twist I didn’t expect. So good for it.
Still…
The water thing was fucking stupid. I can think of a number of ways to get water more conveniently in the solar system without having to deal with uppity apes.
I really didn’t like it - way too many plot holes, bad science, etc. Apart from the fact that the moon fragmenting would haven’t anywhere near that sort of affect on the Earth, I can’t imagine tsunamis, earthquakes, etc. that are so severe they cause hundreds of feet of silt to cover the eastern seaboard, yet still manage to keep the infrastructure relatively stable. Oh, and there’s a desert wasteland just a few miles away.
So why didn’t Morgan Freeman just put up a bunch of signs telling Tom Cruise what the deal was? And why exactly did they need to launch the zippity-fast altered probe from a 1 MPH tractor, instead of just, you know - telling it to zip off zippity-fast?
This was my major peeve too. After that I realized that I needed to turn off my brain and just watch the movie unfold. My date thought that the folding motorcycle was cool though.
ETA: This could have been explained by the aliens actually attacking Earth and causing the destruction and the remaining humans thinking it was the moon that caused it.
One thing I wondered about is the scenes of pre-war New York. Because it is set in the future from now, it shows the completed One World Trade Center tower.
Got to wondering if there are any other movies that show scenes set between the now of the real world and the now of the movie that take into account known pending construction in the real world.
E.g., like a movie made in 1936 but set in 1955 showing the completed Golden Gate Bridge (finished in 1938).
…assume that the survivors were wrong about the Tet’s motivations and it’s actually somehow preparing Earth for colonization for the species that built it. Maybe there’s another ship carrying the colonists set to arrive in a few decades, or they were all in statis about the Tet. Hell, maybe it was program to eventually manufacture them just like it did with Jack & Victoria.
Alien intelligence creates machine intelligence to scour the galaxy and eliminate competing intelligences. Since all biological life requires water, time is something they have in abundance, and the ship will need to refuel, it just takes all the water on any planet with intelligent life and kills two birds with one stone.
As for earthquakes and tsunamis,
[spoiler]I just assumed that this was caused not simply by breaking the moon but by breaking the moon and large pieces falling to Earth, triggering tsunamis, earthquakes, and cooking large swaths of the planet to near sterility.
Doesn’t explain how the White House and Washington Monument survive it all but every other building in Washington, D.C., is wiped out.[/spoiler]
