Oblivion n shit
Apr. 19th, 2013 02:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficOkay, I went into this movie basically spoiler-free except for seeing the unavoidable trailers, and they pretty much give away the whole movie, but still, to be safe, I'm going to put most of this stuff under a cut just in case, like, you're actually waiting in line at the theater right now and you don't want me to ruin it. It's okay, it'll keep. Point is, it is pretty dumb…
Still with me? Good. Alright, here is the thing about Oblivion. The screenplay structure, to me, is just completely borked. Which is something that I don't see a lot. Usually, I can at least see what a writer is going for, but here, I legitimately don't know how they said "Yeah, we're ready, send in Tom Cruise to act this out." I probably use the criticism too much that a movie could use a rewrite or another draft, because of course if something's wrong with a movie's story, it could use a rewrite. That's why you rewrite something. But this is the grand poobah of that.
Alright, so as you saw in the trailer, Tom Cruise is Wall-E (I at one point thought he literally was a robot, and that was the big twist, since he gets shot right in the fucking chest and shrugs it off. But it turns out that I guess in the future, handguns are just really fucking lame). Aliens called Scavs invaded and though Earth beat them back with nukes, there are still survivors making trouble for the Drones that Tom Cruise is servicing, with their bombs and ambushes and such—if you care to extend a metaphor, this would make for a movie where Iraqi insurgents are the good guys, but lest you think that sounds the slightest bit interesting, I don't think the movie is aware that Tom Cruise is playing Osama bin Laden? Even though it ends with him going on a suicide mission to bomb something.
Anyway, just as Tom Cruise found out in the trailer, the Scavs are really humans, which means he's actually working for the bad guys. The Scav-humans tell him they need his help to kill all the bad guys. This happens thirty minutes in, but instead of the rest of the movie being about Tom Cruise killing all the bad guys, he needs to tool around and find out comparatively minor details about his situation for the next hour or so.
It's hard to overstate how weird this is and how little impact any of it has on the plot. It's like finding out that the US government caused 9/11, and then that the President likes to wear women's underwear. Once the former is on the table, how could the latter possibly be an issue? I think the obvious structure is that Tom Cruise starts to find out the small weird things, then eventually discovers the big weird thing, but if they did that, this movie basically would've been Moon.
Also, to keep this dubious structure intact, there are multiple occasions where supposedly smart characters uncover SHOCKING, EARTH-SHAKING, THIS-CHANGES-EVERYTHING information and just kinda shrug it off. Like, they don't even go "Hey, what do you mean by that?" No one ever elaborates on anything, no matter how much it calls for it. At one point, Tom Cruise even asks Morgan Freeman "Hey, why didn't you just tell me all this in the first place?" And Morgan Freeman replies "If I'd told you, you'd have thought I was crazy." This after Tom Cruise has figured out the evil aliens he's spent his whole life trying to genocide are really innocent human beings. I think he should've been slightly open-minded then.
Another time, Tom Cruise thaws an astronaut out of cryo-sleep and explains to her that it's been sixty years, the world's been destroyed, et al. Then he asks her what she was doing in cryo-sleep. "That's classified," she replies. The fact that everyone who was authorized to know is most certainly dead doesn't seem to occur to anyone.
By the way, despite this being a movie with three main characters, one of whom is Tom Cruise, the others being women, this is possibly the woman-unfriendliest movie I've seen in a while. Andrea Riseborough plays Victoria, Tom Cruise's fellow repairman, who is also sleeping with him for no other reason but to have an entirely lame "woman scorned" subplot when he starts making googly eyes at Olga Kuryenko, playing the astronaut. You'd think a highly trained flight officer would be more mature than to fly into a nigh-homicidal rage because she saw her beau in a clinch with another woman. I know that one astronaut went off to kill someone with diapers or something, but you'd have thought she was an outlier.
It's a shame, because Riseborough actually has a lot better chemistry with Tom Cruise and the love story being between them would have been a lot thematically denser than the cliché "true love conquers all/love at first sight/soulmate" nonsense between Cruise and Kuryenko. As for Kuryenko, she doesn't fare much better. She has nothing more to do in the climax than literally be lugged around by Tom Cruise like a piece of baggage. That, and give birth to the spawn of Cruise, apparently conceived the very night that Tom Cruise's previous lover was murdered before his eyes (HER CORPSE-Y DUST EVEN SPLATTERING ON HIS FACE!).
I suppose at times like this it's tempting to blame the writer, but by no means should we let the director off the hook. After all, it must've been his idea to stage and score an underwater love scene between Cruise and Riseborough as if it were the single most passionate thing to happen since Rizzoli and Isles looked at each other, even though the story insists that the two are mismatched and incompatible.
Speaking of said story, I don't like the notion that a movie should have only one sci-fi conceit. A lot of people criticized Looper for having two, even though it did nothing but good for the story at the low, low price of violating a completely arbitrary screenwriting rule. But Oblivion shows the flipside of that, in how it throws so much sci-fi shit against the wall that it actually comes across as undisciplined. They simply don't need all that stuff in there.
For instance, we're told right off the bat that Tom Cruise underwent a "mandatory memory wipe," just so the people who've never seen a movie before can figure out something sinister is afoot along with the rest of us. Why is this necessary? Why not just say, at the appropriate time, that he was given false memories? Then later on, it's revealed that Tom Cruise is a clone and there are multiple Tom Cruises running around. The plot would be exactly the same if he were the original Tom Cruise, brainwashed by aliens. The only impact is that Oblivion looks like even more of a rip-off of Moon, and that Tom Cruise gets to both heroically sacrifice himself and have a Mega Happy Ending where he starts a family with Olga Kuryenko in a picturesque cabin by the lake.
Oh, and there's a bit where early on in the film, Tom Cruise's ride gets struck by lightning and spazzes out in a "remember this for later" way. Then later, he uses the "trick" of knowing that being struck by lightning is bad to take out some pursuing ships. Only they completely ignore it. It's like they're subverting the cliché, but without any awareness of what they're doing. Like an idiot-savant Joss Whedon. Without the savant part.
Still with me? Good. Alright, here is the thing about Oblivion. The screenplay structure, to me, is just completely borked. Which is something that I don't see a lot. Usually, I can at least see what a writer is going for, but here, I legitimately don't know how they said "Yeah, we're ready, send in Tom Cruise to act this out." I probably use the criticism too much that a movie could use a rewrite or another draft, because of course if something's wrong with a movie's story, it could use a rewrite. That's why you rewrite something. But this is the grand poobah of that.
Alright, so as you saw in the trailer, Tom Cruise is Wall-E (I at one point thought he literally was a robot, and that was the big twist, since he gets shot right in the fucking chest and shrugs it off. But it turns out that I guess in the future, handguns are just really fucking lame). Aliens called Scavs invaded and though Earth beat them back with nukes, there are still survivors making trouble for the Drones that Tom Cruise is servicing, with their bombs and ambushes and such—if you care to extend a metaphor, this would make for a movie where Iraqi insurgents are the good guys, but lest you think that sounds the slightest bit interesting, I don't think the movie is aware that Tom Cruise is playing Osama bin Laden? Even though it ends with him going on a suicide mission to bomb something.
Anyway, just as Tom Cruise found out in the trailer, the Scavs are really humans, which means he's actually working for the bad guys. The Scav-humans tell him they need his help to kill all the bad guys. This happens thirty minutes in, but instead of the rest of the movie being about Tom Cruise killing all the bad guys, he needs to tool around and find out comparatively minor details about his situation for the next hour or so.
It's hard to overstate how weird this is and how little impact any of it has on the plot. It's like finding out that the US government caused 9/11, and then that the President likes to wear women's underwear. Once the former is on the table, how could the latter possibly be an issue? I think the obvious structure is that Tom Cruise starts to find out the small weird things, then eventually discovers the big weird thing, but if they did that, this movie basically would've been Moon.
Also, to keep this dubious structure intact, there are multiple occasions where supposedly smart characters uncover SHOCKING, EARTH-SHAKING, THIS-CHANGES-EVERYTHING information and just kinda shrug it off. Like, they don't even go "Hey, what do you mean by that?" No one ever elaborates on anything, no matter how much it calls for it. At one point, Tom Cruise even asks Morgan Freeman "Hey, why didn't you just tell me all this in the first place?" And Morgan Freeman replies "If I'd told you, you'd have thought I was crazy." This after Tom Cruise has figured out the evil aliens he's spent his whole life trying to genocide are really innocent human beings. I think he should've been slightly open-minded then.
Another time, Tom Cruise thaws an astronaut out of cryo-sleep and explains to her that it's been sixty years, the world's been destroyed, et al. Then he asks her what she was doing in cryo-sleep. "That's classified," she replies. The fact that everyone who was authorized to know is most certainly dead doesn't seem to occur to anyone.
By the way, despite this being a movie with three main characters, one of whom is Tom Cruise, the others being women, this is possibly the woman-unfriendliest movie I've seen in a while. Andrea Riseborough plays Victoria, Tom Cruise's fellow repairman, who is also sleeping with him for no other reason but to have an entirely lame "woman scorned" subplot when he starts making googly eyes at Olga Kuryenko, playing the astronaut. You'd think a highly trained flight officer would be more mature than to fly into a nigh-homicidal rage because she saw her beau in a clinch with another woman. I know that one astronaut went off to kill someone with diapers or something, but you'd have thought she was an outlier.
It's a shame, because Riseborough actually has a lot better chemistry with Tom Cruise and the love story being between them would have been a lot thematically denser than the cliché "true love conquers all/love at first sight/soulmate" nonsense between Cruise and Kuryenko. As for Kuryenko, she doesn't fare much better. She has nothing more to do in the climax than literally be lugged around by Tom Cruise like a piece of baggage. That, and give birth to the spawn of Cruise, apparently conceived the very night that Tom Cruise's previous lover was murdered before his eyes (HER CORPSE-Y DUST EVEN SPLATTERING ON HIS FACE!).
I suppose at times like this it's tempting to blame the writer, but by no means should we let the director off the hook. After all, it must've been his idea to stage and score an underwater love scene between Cruise and Riseborough as if it were the single most passionate thing to happen since Rizzoli and Isles looked at each other, even though the story insists that the two are mismatched and incompatible.
Speaking of said story, I don't like the notion that a movie should have only one sci-fi conceit. A lot of people criticized Looper for having two, even though it did nothing but good for the story at the low, low price of violating a completely arbitrary screenwriting rule. But Oblivion shows the flipside of that, in how it throws so much sci-fi shit against the wall that it actually comes across as undisciplined. They simply don't need all that stuff in there.
For instance, we're told right off the bat that Tom Cruise underwent a "mandatory memory wipe," just so the people who've never seen a movie before can figure out something sinister is afoot along with the rest of us. Why is this necessary? Why not just say, at the appropriate time, that he was given false memories? Then later on, it's revealed that Tom Cruise is a clone and there are multiple Tom Cruises running around. The plot would be exactly the same if he were the original Tom Cruise, brainwashed by aliens. The only impact is that Oblivion looks like even more of a rip-off of Moon, and that Tom Cruise gets to both heroically sacrifice himself and have a Mega Happy Ending where he starts a family with Olga Kuryenko in a picturesque cabin by the lake.
Oh, and there's a bit where early on in the film, Tom Cruise's ride gets struck by lightning and spazzes out in a "remember this for later" way. Then later, he uses the "trick" of knowing that being struck by lightning is bad to take out some pursuing ships. Only they completely ignore it. It's like they're subverting the cliché, but without any awareness of what they're doing. Like an idiot-savant Joss Whedon. Without the savant part.
