Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion opens on a version of Earth that has already lost. The Moon is gone, destroyed by an alien force called the Scavengers in 2017, and the planet below is a ruin of dust and wreckage. Tom Cruise plays Jack Harper, a drone repairman stationed on the surface with his communications partner Victoria, played by Andrea Riseborough. They are two weeks from leaving for a human colony on Titan. The film runs 124 minutes, and it wants to be a meditation on memory and love. It mostly settles for being a very good-looking puzzle box that runs out of ideas before it runs out of runtime.
Trailer, via Universal Pictures.
The Hydro Rigs and the Tet
Oblivion sets up its world with real confidence. Jack and Victoria live in a sleek tower above the clouds, overseeing hydro rigs that convert seawater into fusion energy for the Tet, the last remaining human colony ship in orbit. Their memories have been erased for security reasons. Jack still dreams of a woman he cannot place. He also keeps a secret: a hidden valley with a lakeside cabin, where he collects relics of the old world.
That tension — the man who follows orders while quietly building a life the orders forbid — is the best thing in the film. Cruise plays it with a stillness that works. He is not doing action-hero Cruise here. He is doing lonely, slightly broken Cruise, and the film is better for it.
Then a NASA module crash-lands, carrying five humans in suspended animation. Drones arrive and kill four of them. Jack saves the fifth: Julia, played by Olga Kurylenko, the woman from his dreams. She has been in stasis since 2017.
Malcolm Beech and the Raven Rock Mountain Complex
The film’s second act belongs to Morgan Freeman. He plays Malcolm Beech, a veteran soldier and leader of the human survivors. The twist is that the Scavengers are not aliens. They are people. Beech and his community have been fighting the Tet, not the other way around.
Freeman brings weight to a role that is underwritten. The problem is that his arrival signals the moment Oblivion stops being a mood piece and starts being a conspiracy thriller, and in this paper’s view the conspiracy is not as interesting as the mood.
Jack and Julia are captured and brought to the Raven Rock Mountain Complex. Beech needs Jack to reprogram a captured drone to deliver a nuclear bomb. The film then reveals that Jack is a clone — one of many — created by the Tet from the original commander of a mission to Titan. Victoria is a clone too, of the British co-pilot on that mission. The Tet copied the likeness of Sally, the mission director, to serve as its visual and auditory representation. Melissa Leo plays both.
This is where the film should deepen. Instead it explains. The revelations land in order, one after another, and to this paper each one flattens the mystery rather than expanding it. By the time Jack meets another version of himself — Tech 52 — the film has, in our view, become a checklist.
What the Cast Is Given
The cast is strong on paper. The execution is uneven.
- Tom Cruise as Jack Harper, Tech 49, and later Tech 52
- Morgan Freeman as Malcolm Beech, leader of the scavengers
- Olga Kurylenko as Julia Rusakova Harper, Jack’s wife and an Odyssey crew member
- Andrea Riseborough as Victoria “Vika” Olsen, Jack’s communications partner
- Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as Sergeant Sykes, Beech’s military commander
- Melissa Leo as the Tet and as Sally
- Zoë Bell as Kara, a scavenger soldier
Kurylenko is given little to do beyond being the object of Jack’s dreams and the trigger for his awakening. Riseborough fares better. Victoria is the film’s most interesting character: a clone of the Tet’s co-pilot, played with a brittle composure that makes the character’s fate genuinely sad. Coster-Waldau is wasted as Sykes, a skeptic who exists to distrust Jack and then stop distrusting him.
A Love Story Buried Under Hardware
The source material describes the film as a love story, and says it is set in 2077 on a post-apocalyptic Earth desolated by an alien war. The love story is there. It is just buried under drones, hydro rigs, and a plot that keeps interrupting itself to explain its own machinery.
The film pays homage to 1970s sci-fi, and you can feel it in the design — the clean white surfaces, the analog switches, the wide empty landscapes. It looks extraordinary. The problem is that it looks extraordinary in a way that keeps the audience at a distance. The valley, the cabin, the relics: these are the film’s emotional core, and they are also the parts that feel most like set decoration.
Kurylenko prepared for her role by watching astronaut training videos and classic science fiction and romance films, including Solaris, Notorious, and Casablanca. “The story — both in Solaris and Oblivion — deals with space and memory,” she said. That is the film Oblivion wants to be. It is not that film.
The Score
Oblivion premiered in Buenos Aires on March 26, 2013, and Universal released it in theaters on April 19. It grossed $286 million worldwide on a production budget of $120 million. The critical reception was mixed, and that is the right verdict.
The film is not a failure. It is a near-miss with a real vision behind it. Kosinski can build a world. He can frame a shot. He can get a performance out of Cruise that suggests a man who has been alone too long. What he cannot do — or what the screenplay by Karl Gajdusek and Michael deBruyn cannot do — is make the answers as compelling as the questions.
This paper holds that the best science fiction trusts its audience to sit with uncertainty. Oblivion does not. It explains, and then it explains again. By the final act, when the Tet is destroyed and Tech 52 seeks out Julia, the film has, to our mind, spent its mystery and has nothing left but resolution.
Worth watching for the design, the mood, and Riseborough. Not worth watching for the story it tells.
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