Box office record-breaking Tom Cruise movie on Netflix won’t let you blink
Tom Cruise is one of the luckiest, most talented and most prolific actors in Hollywood. Pretty much everything he sets out to do is well done and successful. His role in “Oblivion” is not one of his best known, but it worked very well and has good reviews from critics. The science fiction film is about a dystopian future where the Earth has been destroyed after a war with extraterrestrials, called “Marauders”.
Isolated on a space station, Jack Harper (Cruise) and Vika (Andrea Riseborough) have been assigned by larger forces to live as a couple and work together to repair drones damaged by marauders on the ruined planet Earth. Jack dreams every night about a mysterious woman who he doesn’t know who she is. Longing for the pre-apocalyptic life, he is not so convinced and happy with the idea that in a few weeks they will travel to a new planet where what is left of humanity is re-establishing itself.
Jack and Vika are seemingly the perfect couple until they find a capsule containing a human, Julia (Olga Kurylenko). When he encounters the woman, he is confused to notice that she is the person who appears in his dreams. Julia asks Jack to accompany her to her ship so she can recover the recordings containing what happened in her last minutes awake.
It turns out that when they retrieve the black box from Julia’s ship, the curtains fall back and the world as Jack knew it is revealed as a farce. Gradually, mysteries about its past and what really happened on the planet are being clarified.
Tom Cruise appears as always very competent in performing his action scenes. As a professional pilot and aircraft specialist, he participated during pre-production in the development and design of the film’s ships. Although it is sci-fi, the film does not have a plot as complex and dense as usual in the genre. That is, it is a feature film that everyone can watch and enjoy.
Having many action scenes, “Oblivion” is also competent to deliver entertainment and fun. But make no mistake. There aren’t really scenes with humor or a silly and vain script. Although more of Vika could be explored, as well as the theme of belonging and identity, which when it finally starts to be fleshed out is interrupted by the plot’s follow-up. But that’s understandable. Probably the creator and director of the story, Joseph Kosinski, wanted his film to be more accessible.
The script for “Oblivion” is based on a comic by Kosinski that he created in 2005 but never published. Shot in Iceland, where the film crew stayed for ten days, where there was no night, the director, unlike other films of the genre, such as “Blade Runner”, wanted to turn daylight into the hallmark of this sci-fi film.
Another relevant information is that for a while the production came to belong to Disney, but after considering the amount of changes that had to be made to fit the general age group, the studio abandoned the project, which was bought by Universal Pictures . In addition to Cruise and 2023 Best Actress Oscar nominee Andrea Riseborough, the feature film also features appearances by Morgan Freeman and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau.
Movie: oblivion
Direction: Joseph Kosinski
Year: 2013
Sex: Sci-Fi/Action
Note: 8/10
