Sir Thomas Sean Connery said:
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.
Sir Thomas Sean Connery said:
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.
Sir Thomas Sean Connery said:
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..
Dr Killpatient said:
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.