Escape to the Movies: Oblivion

[K84]

It's a solid movie.

I get the feeling that Bob wouldn't be so nit picky and hard on it if someone else then Cruise, had played Jack Harper.

Or maybe I'm just a sucker for sci-fi

I blame my youth and way to much 80ties cartoons.
I accept mutant turtles and transforming robots more easily than regular folk.
So semi evil AI's from space using clones which revolt are right up my alley.
Plus eyecandy and a nice Tron Legacy esque score...
I like Oblivion, it's a guilty pleasure, like Prometheus.

 

[Milanezi]

Heh, I actually loved the movie. Though I'll grant you that the amount of plot twists made certain parts of the movie feel needlessly hollow. But it managed to entertain me, and now I'm working on my brand new dream: own a house with that kick ass pool from the movie

 

[Terminal Blue]

Nonsense coming right up!

1) A human repairman makes sense. Humans are extremely adaptable, extremely versatile creatures. Cruz is better at navigating the terrain then any robot and get around stuff that would beat robots.

A human repairman makes sense if their loyalty does not have to be maintained by an easily broken deception and if the circumstances of their being there are not so incredibly suspicious as to make the fact that a deception exists incredibly obvious (to everyone, of course, except the highly intelligent astronauts).

You know the funny thing is, we have a really good example of an alien race carrying out this exact same scheme (conquering earth and draining its resources with human helpers) intelligently. It's called Half Life 2. You don't need easily confused clones to make people turn on each other, you just need to offer them a way to survive or to better their situation.

Better still, that's also more relevant to the viewer because similar things have actually happened throughout human history. The use of deception here is really just a silly attempt to keep the protagonist's situation morally simple, because God forbid a science fiction film deal with themes and ethical problems beyond "aleens ar bad". No science fiction film has ever done that..

Mind wiped Cruze's were fine for an invasion where they just need to kill people, but not much else. Besides, it was simple enough to set up and run.

..right up until the point when your clone inevitably realizes the pitiful deception and goes and blows you the hell up.

 

[Sir Thomas Sean Connery]

I'm having to work really REALLY fucking hard right now to not burst into an all-caps rage and get myself perma-banned as a result of my page of insults.

Alright, from the top.

1) A human repairman makes sense. Humans are extremely adaptable, extremely versatile creatures. Cruz is better at navigating the terrain then any robot and get around stuff that would beat robots.

2) Total mind wiping wouldn't have worked. They needed the ruse in order for Cruz to keep all the things I mentioned above. Mind wiped Cruze's were fine for an invasion where they just need to kill people, but not much else. Besides, it was simple enough to set up and run.

3) So what if the twists were for their own sake? They were incredibly well done and every single one made sense. The twists served the plot, not the other way around.

I'm far too mad to watch your review again to look for more things you got wrong, but I'm sure someone will give me more nonsense to rebuke.

This movie was brilliantly acted, extremely well written and is one of the most beautifully shot and designed films in recent memory. My favorite Sci-Fi movie in a long LONG time.

I was really hoping you of all people, the guy that gave 2012 a pass, could appreciate this.

Just to note, on your 3 there? If the twists served the plot, then they were by definition not there for their own sake. So, were they or weren't they there for their own sake? I think they were.

And you'll never convince me that a machine that advanced could not design a repairbot with comparable-to-human versatility.

On the twists...... I really can't respond. It's a matter of taste. If a twist is done well, takes me for a ride and doesn't break the plot, I'm on board. If you and Bob don't like twists like that, not much I can do about it.

I WOULD argue about how life will always be more versatile and efficient than a simple robot like the drones and how in reality, Bob missed a major theme of even the AI needing life, thus illustrating how even the most advanced machine can't compare to humans, but that would be silly since I will apparently never convince you.

Nonsense coming right up!

1) A human repairman makes sense. Humans are extremely adaptable, extremely versatile creatures. Cruz is better at navigating the terrain then any robot and get around stuff that would beat robots.

A human repairman makes sense if their loyalty does not have to be maintained by an easily broken deception and if the circumstances of their being there are not so incredibly suspicious as to make the fact that a deception exists incredibly obvious (to everyone, of course, except the highly intelligent astronauts).

You know the funny thing is, we have a really good example of an alien race carrying out this exact same scheme (conquering earth and draining its resources with human helpers) intelligently. It's called Half Life 2. You don't need easily confused clones to make people turn on each other, you just need to offer them a way to survive or to better their situation.

Better still, that's also more relevant to the viewer because similar things have actually happened throughout human history. The use of deception here is really just a silly attempt to keep the protagonist's situation morally simple, because God forbid a science fiction film deal with themes and ethical problems beyond "aleens ar bad". No science fiction film has ever done that..

Mind wiped Cruze's were fine for an invasion where they just need to kill people, but not much else. Besides, it was simple enough to set up and run.

..right up until the point when your clone inevitably realizes the pitiful deception and goes and blows you the hell up.

In terms of half-life, I don't see how that kind of convincing could have worked. When Breen joined the Combine, there's still a lot of humanity left, the Earth is in relatively good shape and there an opportunity for a good future. This was not the case with Oblivion. I don't see ANYONE willingly going along in the situation presented if they knew they were working for the attackers.

As for exploring themes, yeah, Oblivion didn't, but I don't see that as a needed addition. A science fiction story doesn't need to have an exploration of the meaning of life, the universe and everything if it presents a very alien situation and cool technology to play in that world.

And again, the loyalty clearly wasn't that much of an issue until the one breach. Only one Tom Cruz made the discovery, it was many many years into the process AND it required Morgan Freeman to bring down a spaceship with his wife in it.

When a system takes that much to break it and doesn't require anything more than food more 2 people per zone, I'd say it's pretty damn effective.

It wasn't inevitable at all.

Actually, instead of MY arguemnts, just read this:

Where is all this hate coming from?

Did Bob like Moon or did he hate it as well?

I mean, why is Sam maintaining the harvesters on Moon more believable than Jack maintaining the harvesters on Earth? As far as I'm concerned, those movies have the same premise.

"...having a few repair-drones maintain the fighting-drones."

I've heard this one before. But who would maintain the repair drones?

We do see Jack fixing the drone with a piece of gum. So is it really that unbelievable that they need the humans as the final link of ingenuity in that chain, instead of having an endless chain of drones fixing drones fixing drones fixing drones etc.

Or maybe they need humans to fight the remaining scavs or use them as an early warning system if the scavs would mount an attack against the machines. For example the Matrix uses Cypher (human) to get to Morpheus (also human).

What if Tet is programmed to take advantage of the indigenous species and incorporate them in the harvesting cycle?

What if fixing drones on Earth is cheaper and quicker than sending them back to Tet to be fixed?

More to the point, who the hell would want to watch a movie about drones fixing drones?

To me all these are plausible explanations, but Bob simply ignores them all together and stamps the movie as being "bad" just because he cannot make any sense of the premise. Then what about Matrix using humans as batteries? What an awful shit that was - in Bob's world.

Folks, this is a definition of bad movie reviewing. A reviewer who considers movie to be bad, simply because he doesn't agree with it's premise. Sure Oblivion has it's faults - pacing would be one of them, especially towards the end. But Bob just pisses on the efforts put into this movie by Cruise, Kurylenko, and a fantastic newcomer Riseborough, plus the breathtaking visuals of post-apocalyptic Earth by Claudio Miranda (Oscar for Life of Pi) and ethreal music by M83.

If you didn't watch Bob's review to the end, go see the movie and make up your own mind. If you did, then thank Bob for ruining one of the memorable (for me at least) sci-fi movies of the past decade.

Sums everything up much better.

If there is a possible solution, it isn't a plot hole.

 

[Grey_Area]

I enjoyed myself watching this, albeit in German since the cinema I went to didn't show it with subtitles (in Switzerland - many do though).

However, if you are going to poke holes in the plot, why not identify the elephant in the room of all movies that show a species coming to Earth to suck us dry of energy/resources. There's a damn great fusion reactor eight light minutes away capable of powering anything you want in one direction, and iron and other elements in sufficiently manageable chunks floating around in the form of the asteroid belt in the other direction; any alien species, robot or biological, wouldn't have to go anywhere near us.

 

[Terminal Blue]

In terms of half-life, I don't see how that kind of convincing could have worked. When Breen joined the Combine, there's still a lot of humanity left, the Earth is in relatively good shape and there an opportunity for a good future. This was not the case with Oblivion. I don't see ANYONE willingly going along in the situation presented if they knew they were working for the attackers.

In Half Life, all native sea life has been destroyed and the oceans themselves are being slowly drained into the Combine dimension through a portal on the sea floor. Human reproduction has been halted and non-essential humans are being systematically transformed into lobotomized cyborgs. Breen knows all this, he's actively participating in and administrating much of it. He's not serving on the promise that Earth will be spared, he's serving on the promise that, as part of the Combine, some part of humanity will be allowed to survive on other worlds (or in other dimensions).

When people know (or feel) that their situation is genuinely hopeless, they will cling to anything which appears to give them a chance, however slim. If an alien race was capable of wiping out humanity to the degree depicted in the film, I can pretty much guarantee some people would be willing to go along with it in exchange for a reprieve. Heck, I certainly can't promise that I wouldn't.

As for exploring themes, yeah, Oblivion didn't, but I don't see that as a needed addition. A science fiction story doesn't need to have an exploration of the meaning of life, the universe and everything if it presents a very alien situation and cool technology to play in that world.

I agree to an extent, there is such a thing as a cool but dumb movie and there can be cool dumb sci-fi movies. For example, I actually sort of like the movie Independence Day even though I know it would have to take smart-drugs to be considered dumb. I could do without all the wanking on the American flag, of course, but the basic premise of doing an alien invasion movie in epic scale with big-ass visuals and Will Smith and horribly stereotypical support characters. Yeah, I can totally get behind that.

..but put it this way.. why does everyone rag on M. Night Shyamalan while giving far less daring filmmakers a free ride? Is it because his movies are incompetently made or hard to watch or even particularly bad? Not really. It's because they're pretentious.

The word pretentious gets overused, but when you put a bunch of twists and visual flourishes in your movie as if it's a substitute for an interesting narrative, that is genuinely pretentious, and unfortunately a lot of genre movies now seem to have adopted the notion that you can just use twists or interesting looking visuals as a substitute for having anything to say while still pretending you had something to say.

I agree, this is a pretty, pretty film and I totally wanted to like it, but it is kind of pretentious. It's not trying to be a dumb movie, it really wants you to believe that it has something to say, with the bleak visuals and aesthetic and poster shots of Tom cruise posing near destroyed landmarks, but when you actually dig in there's nothing there.

And again, the loyalty clearly wasn't that much of an issue until the one breach. Only one Tom Cruz made the discovery, it was many many years into the process AND it required Morgan Freeman to bring down a spaceship with his wife in it.

The point, and the one I think Bob was making too, is more along the lines of how did he not work it out sooner? The only reason I can see that it took any of these events to make him realize is that he doesn't follow up on any of the blatantly suspicious things about the situation he finds himself in.

Anyway, since you asked..

Did Bob like Moon or did he hate it as well?

I didn't like Moon, but I will say that it is far less pretentious and I can see why some people would like it more.

There are dumb things in Moon. Technology is inconsistent, a bunch of things essential to the plot have absolutely no reason to exist and the premise itself is ludicrous, but at the end of the day it's a claustrophobic, character driven film which never cuts away from its actual focus, which is on the characters themselves.

While I don't think either version of Sam is as fleshed out or well acted as some reviewers have claimed, he comes off as a human being like yourself. There's enough of him to carry a movie. I don't think the same can be said of Jack here.

A nonsensical premise or silly plot holes can be ignored if the movie it's built around has something to say beyond just holding your hand through a story. In this case, I'd question whether that's true.

 

[ars731]

I liked this movie better when it was called Moon

 

[walsfeo]

I was able to buy into the first lie, about the whole memory thing they talk about right up front because I didn't know what the rationale was. However...

Spoiler

... once they explained that lots of him got off and killed damned near everyone on earth it really made me wonder "Why the heck did they have to wipe the brains so they could play IT department?"

 

[wolfyrik]

***SPOILERS BELOW***

So Tom Cruise was conditioned to work for Aliens and lost his wife? This isn't an original story, it's a documentary!

***SPOILERS ABOVE***

This, this and thrice this!

10 internets to you, sir.

 

[duchaked]

it bothered me that I saw this movie's trailer right before (or after idr) seeing the After Earth trailer (the one with Will Smith?) during the same film screening's previews lol...

seriously do studios just happen to come out with Armageddon and Deep Impact films at the same time or what?

Yes. Its been a long time tradition in Hollywood for the big studios to investigate what the competition is making and then just copy that. That's why we have whole decades that were filled with mostly bible epics, crime noir dramas, musicals, westerns, war films, disaster movies, space operas, slasher flicks, coming of age comedies, biographies, and comic book super hero adaptations.

lol don't remind me of the time when Disney and Dreamworks were going back and forth and back and forth...

not saying they aren't still doing that, but it's a bit less obvious at the moment...for now

 

[lancar]

Hm. Oh well...

I watched it, I liked it and I thought it was pretty good. Nothing too fancy, but a perfectly acceptable and enjoyable post-apoc movie. I didn't feel that the twist was a twist just for the sake of it either.

Guess it's an advantage of not being a professional critic. I get to enjoy media much more easily.

 

[piclemaniscool]

It sucks that this movie is being panned by critics everywhere I look. I loved the movie. Maybe I'm just that 1% that understood exactly what the writers were trying to show. Everything Bob points out made perfect sense to me, but I can see how if you don't have a very specific mindset toward it, the story can become very confusing.

I don't watch many Cruise movies, so I can't compare, but I think tired-of-life-and-perpetually-confused fit very well in this context. Everything about it points to a different source material, but I thought this Frankenstein was pretty good looking, even if the stitches were showing a bit.

That being said, I actually wrote notes on the different things I could compare Oblivion with:

*** SPOILERS ***

Name: Elder Scrolls game. Setting: Mass Effect + Fallout. Starring Chell and Booker DeWitt. Music: Inception + Tron: Legacy. Tom Cruise builds a house on Earth resembling the one in Narnia. Morgan Freeman is Morpheus in Power Armor. Trench Run against drones. PLOT TWIST: It's actually the plot of Red vs Blue. In the end, Tom Cruise pulls an Independance Day on Master Control Program/HAL 9000 with a "fuck you sally" to go along with it.

*** /SPOILERS ***

 

[sarkeizen]

Where is all this hate coming from?
I've heard this one before. But who would maintain the repair drones?

How about that big machine sitting in the sky. It came from somewhere. It traveled vast distances without people and all of a sudden human clones are vital to it's operation?

What if Tet is programmed to take advantage of the indigenous species and incorporate them in the harvesting cycle?

Either humans are the better tool or they aren't. If humans are the better tool then there shouldn't be drones an army of humans already took over the planet. Tet was capable of maintaining that, so it's reasonable to believe that it would be able to maintain a smaller force. If humans aren't the right tool, then they shouldn't be there.

What if fixing drones on Earth is cheaper and quicker than sending them back to Tet to be fixed?

Conversely how are humans avoiding the Z-rays from man-in-the-moon marigolds? The fact that someone can rationalize something doesn't mean the plot is well thought out. If there is a reasonable question to be answered then the film should answer it. Period.

More to the point, who the hell would want to watch a movie about drones fixing drones?

Reminds me of Burnside's Zeroth Law which IMHO does about as much harm as good. So much crap writing is justified by it. Here's a hint, if you can only write a nonsensical story...don't. write. it.

Folks, this is a definition of bad movie reviewing. A reviewer who considers movie to be bad, simply because he doesn't agree with it's premise.

It's not a very good definition. So I can't call a movie bad which because it's a documentary where the premise is Butz's "The Hoax of the Twentieth Century"? I'm pretty sure I'm allowed to call such a film bad without further qualification. Like I said earlier, the fact than you can dream up a reason why something might be possible doesn't mean the movie is well-thought out.

For me Oblivion was nicely designed, stupidly paced (how many times did we watch people walk around?!), ended badly and was poorly thought out.

 

[Ickabod]

I don't know I liked it. Reason being, the problems that Bob brings up are so OBVIOUS early on that they really don't matter. The "plot twists" are obvious too, but honestly I was more curious to see how they got to the ending more than what it was, because I could already figure out the ending.

Anyway it wasn't great, but I enjoyed it. It was better than Prometheus for sure.

 

[Duffeknol]

And again, Bob and I completely disagree. What is it with Bob always hating genuinely enjoyable movies? Stop being such a nitpicker, jees.

 

[ProfessorLayton]

I should know better than to watch MovieBob's reviews but here I am one again shaking my head in disappointment. I get the feeling that he didn't even watch the same movie I just did, because most of the "plot holes" that he points out are completely explained by the end and everything fits together quite nicely. To be honest, I will admit that I did see a lot of the plot twists coming. The trailers gave away far too much information and it does stumble over several sci-fi cliches, but in no way does that make this a bad movie.

What disappoints me even more is the fact that so many of these comments are saying how this review made them decide to skip this movie. It's truly a shame that so many people are going to skip out on this movie because of his review. Truly, this is a well directed, gorgeous, atmospheric movie with an excellent soundtrack driving the whole thing. Certainly not going to win best picture, but definitely worth a watch.

 

[karamazovnew]

Thanks for the insult, I'll have to write that down, it's a keeper.

OK, huge misunderstanding here: that wasn't directed at you, I was saying that one of my favourite pet-peeves in movies is when movie-writers try to write intelligent beings and or humans but aren't intelligent enough to make it believable. It was directed at the movie, and movies in general. It's why I can't stand Watchmen, because the supposedly more intelligent than any human being Dr. Manhattan is just so stupid it hurts my brain.


As for the bit about the actual movie:

Spoiler

1. What exactly did Victoria do that doomed so many and was so tragic?
2. What exactly happened at the Odyssey?
3. No... the whole clone thing is still really stupid. Especially considering that for a robotic entity with limited resources creating clones, taking care of them, feeding them and making sure they don't turn on it would take more resources (definitely more of the precious water resource), than simply having a few repair-drones maintain the fighting-drones.

Sorry for the late reply. Was pretty pissed that day and I'm glad more people enjoyed the movie for what it was. I didn't expect to write an essay about it, but then again as a Star Trek (not the new action crap) fan, this movie touched some buttons and made me like it a lot. Anyway...

Spoiler

The Odyssey was the best Nasa ship, which in 2017 went out to explore Titan (I think). However back on Earth sensors picked up the Tet ship, and Odyssey was sent in to investigate. Only 2 people were awake, Jack and Victoria, the rest being in sleeping pods. When they approached the Tet, they were pulled in by force. With no escape possibility, they ejected the life module where the others were sleeping. Jack could've done this on his own, but Victoria refused to leave him alone. So they both ended up being captured, killed and cloned. Later, Victoria serves as Jack's wife and overseer, reporting on their progress to the Tet. She is far more calculated and mission obsessed than Jack is. She just wants to get home, so she's wary about Jack's passion for Earth. When Jack finds his real wife, and part of the truth, Victoria, instead of joining them, unknowingly betrays them, and dies very quickly as a result. Jack later finds another Victoria, tries to convince her to come with him, she refuses, and because at this time he has no idea who she really was, just leaves her be. This Victoria ends up sending a few drones (again, just doing her job, oblivious of what was going on) which kill a lot of people and destroy the drone which was supposed to deliver a bomb to destroy the Tet. So Jack now has to fly the bomb himself. On the trip there, he finally remembers the whole Odyssey scene and who Victoria was. And he gets killed in the explosion. So once the clones back on Earth remain without any Tet support, they probably just all die of starvation. As you've probably read in my previous comment, one Jack survives, but he takes some time to recover his memories, so undoubtedly his Victoria ends up dying too. I found it tragic that one person can be a hero, and then an unknowing villain, just by being herself. She definitely had more character than Julia did.

As for the clone thing. Remember that the clones were made mainly to invade, not to repair. The Tet is basically a big cloning ship. As an invasion force, this is a smart idea, as it is easy to adapt to anything you find. The war was won and there was an ample supply of ready made clones. There is no evidence that the Tet can steal anything but water. It might not be able to mine metals. Maybe the drones themselves were actually designed and built by Jack and there is an ample supply of metal from old Earth buildings. I suspect that the engineers houses had also been built by the clones in the wake of the war. We're only shown things from our Jack's point of view, and he doesn't know much. But if we compare this with Moon, Moon is a much worse offender at using clones stupidly. I expected Sam to find out that Earth was long gone and everything had been going on automatically for thousands of years. Instead, only a few years had passed and clones were made just so that the company didn't have to pay the dude? WTF? At least Oblivion puts clones to much better use.

I still hope you're gonna see this movie. It's not a masterpiece, by far, but it's a damn good sci fi movie. I've just seen War of the Worlds again and... boy that was bad. But it got 4/5 stars just because it was made by Spielberg?! Oblivion is much much better.