Let’s just come out swinging here: I really, really liked TRON: LEGACY. A lot. For all of its faults (which lie almost entirely within its screenplay), I just got carried away by the world-building and the whiz and bang of it all. And the magic hasn’t worn off. I’ve revisited the film a few times and enjoy being taken to “the grid” each time. The story issues don’t increasingly bother me so much as gently fade into the background as Daft Punk’s score lulls me into electronic joy.
But this isn’t a TRON: LEGACY review, so what am I going on about? OBLIVION is LEGACY director Joseph Kosinski’s sophomore film and this time he got to build a world of his own, rather than being tied to a pre-existing franchise. Which is one of the reasons I was so highly anticipating seeing OBLIVION. I wanted to see what else the TRON guy had up his sleeve. I wanted to see original sci-fi. I was excited to hear yet another sweeping, electronic/orchestral score, this time by M83. I even wanted to see a new Tom Cruise joint!
So what was my ultimate experience with OBLIVION? Turns out I dug it quite a bit. It also turns out that my first paragraph above applies a lot more than I maybe thought it would. Because my sense is that, if you loathed and despised TRON: LEGACY, you are going to detest OBLIVION. But if, like me, you had an affinity for Kosinski’s previous work, you may find a lot to like here as well.
OBLIVION is certainly a highly stylized film, and may succeed more as a work of visual wonder and aural delight than it does as a story. But even the story succeeded for me by twisting and engrossing me enough to care. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t really sure I was onboard for the ride in the first 30 minutes or so, but the story got it’s hooks into me and I found myself intrigued and invested in the outcome.
I can’t imagine anyone arguing that the visuals here are pretty spectacular. The art department , the costume team, the modelers and design teams… they all seem to be having the time of their lives. And the sound design is wholly aces as well.
Cruise’s character Jack lives in an incredible glass Jetson’s house in the sky where he sleeps with and works alongside of Victoria (Andrea Riseborough.) I love this retro cloud home and the ship that Jack hops into every day to check the surface of earth and maintain the drones which patrol in order to keep the Scavs (enemies of mankind and alien invaders) away from their water treatment machines. The drones themselves are sleek, stylish death machines which are crucial to the story and have incredible sound design and destructive power. The destroyed Earth landscape can also be fascinating to look at if curiously rendered (which I’ll get to in a minute.)
So there is a lot of wonderful sci-fi imagery, and a fairly solitary Tom Cruise who gets to wander through his own personal wasteland and question who he is (his memory was wiped for the mission), and why he can’t stay forever on Earth since mankind won the war against the invading alien race. They are good sci-fi questions to ask. And OBLIVION will take a lot of twists and turns in order to answer those questions.
Those twists and turns ask viewers to swallow quite a few things that may very well be too large for a lot of viewers’ throats. As for me, I had a couple of gripes with various plot machinations and reveals, but Cruise and Co. already had their hooks in me by that point and I was too invested to be all that upset. That said, if you want a pretty awesome, spoiler-filled address of the many plot holes found in OBLIVION’s script, check out this piece by Scott Beggs at Film School Rejects. He notes quite a few issues with the screenplay that I agree with, but which didn’t really bother me all that much. You know what it reminds me of? My reaction to TRON: LEGACY! I guess it isn’t all that responsible for a critic to point out a bunch of really massive flaws and issues with a film and then turn around and say they still really dug the movie. But that is exactly what I am saying.
Maybe OBLIVION just really worked for me as an example of style over substance, but at the same time, I really found myself swept away by the story as well. I started out questioning if Tom Cruise was really the right casting for OBLIVION, but in the end, the story was SO very Tom Cruise-ian. I think the sci-fi roots of OBLIVION also really put me into the right mindset to enjoy the film. Although this is an original screenplay based on a non-pre-existing property, OBLIVION is very much a love letter to the science fiction films of earlier eras. I’d say Kosinski’s 2013 creation owes the most to BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES. But it also owes much to THE JETSONS, WALL-E, and Duncan Jones’ MOON. And I’d say most of those inspirations are better films. I would engage in heated debate with you to defend the merits of MOON. But I wouldn’t do the same for OBLIVION. Did you hate the film? I can see how that is possible. And I would probably agree with some of your reasons. Personally, I found OBLIVION to be highly deferential to the great sci-fi that has come before it. But Kosinski has re-packaged a lot of great sci-fi visuals, tropes, and even plot lines, and mixed them up into a blockbuster package for the masses. Have other filmmakers explored the ideas of OBLIVION before, and possibly better? Yes. But I loved the movies that Kosinski seems to be paying homage to here, and really enjoyed the stylized and updated ride that he and Cruise took me on.
So why did the style and substance of OBLIVION manage to grab a hold of me? There are other films where the style so outweighs the substance that I can’t enjoy them. Why does Kosinski seem to be able to talk me into digging his films almost in spite of themselves?
I do feel that Kosinski’s partnership with composers and musicians is something important for today’s film scoring landscape. The Daft Punk score for TRON: LEGACY is incredible. I love that score so much that it truly becomes a character and a personality in that film. I think M83’s score for OBLIVION is also very successful, while not reaching the level of Daft Punk/TRON’s artist/subject matter symbiosis. My feeling on M83’s score is that it sounds… a lot like M83 soundscapes mixed with a Hans Zimmer sensibility. It isn’t the most unique thing I’ve ever heard, but I REALLY like the places of inspiration that this soundtrack comes from, so I like this new creation quite a bit as well. Either way, Kosinski is reaching outside of the typical candidates in Hollywood for big film scores and tapping into artists who are working more in pop culture to bring their aesthetic into his films. I really like that. It feels kind of like what David Fincher is doing with Trent Reznor. Not the most obvious, go-to choices; but the scores of each of these films are bringing a very distinct feel to the films that they support.
I also promised I would dig a little more deeply into why BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES seems to cast such a big shadow over OBLIVION, and why that helps me enjoy the film. I’m a pretty big APES fan, having seen the original series of films several times in various phases of my life going back to when I was fairly young. BENEATH is easily my least favorite of the series, and while I think it is kind of a bad movie… it is still an APES movie. And it is SO very nuts that in some ways I just have to love it. BENEATH expands significantly on the mythology of the first APES movie and lays the groundwork for the huge sci-fi tale that the entire series will tell. I always found the “scorched earth” sets of BENEATH to be both awesome, (because they reduced the majesties of the modern world to gimmicky dust) and at the same time, make absolutely no sense. Why would nuclear weapons create a landscape that looked ANYTHING like what we are seeing in the APES movies? Sure, I can understand there being some underground remnants left after a nuclear meltdown. But would every surviving remnant really be the most obvious cultural landmarks of the civilization that came before? Why aren’t there tons of little suburbs scattering the globe? Why is there just a Statue Of Liberty kinda chillin’ on an empty East Coast beach?
Well, OBLIVION seems to be set entirely in the world of BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES, just minus the apes. Kosinski crafts a futurescape that is pretty to look at, aesthetically pleasing, and makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. I honestly can’t even wrap my brain around why a bunch of nukes would scientifically make the planet look anything like OBLIVION’s vision of the scorched earth. But the homage to the APES films of yesterday seemed so clear to me that I totally went with it. It made me excited for the day when our current APES reboot series actually gets to that stage of the earth’s future. Not to mention that the “Forbidden Zones” of the APES movies also have a clear counterpart here in OBLIVION with the “Radiation Zones” that Jack isn’t supposed to travel inside of.
I could keep going. I could pull up another great sci-fi film, and tell you some very clear ways that Kosinski and other writers of OBLIVION seemed to have either found inspiration from it, or outright cribbed from it. Your take on how much you enjoy OBLIVION will probably directly relate to how much you feel Kosinski and Co. are making something new from what came before, or just retreading what came before in a more mainstream package. I obviously feel that Kosinski brings enough energy, style, and artistry to the table that I would like to see his continued visions on the big screen.
And I’m Out.
Originally published at old.cinapse.co on April 20, 2013.