It's Not a Remake. It's Not a Sequel. It's "Oblivion."

Oblivion - Directed Joseph Kosinski, written by Kosinski, Karl Gajdusek, and Michael Arndt, starring Tom Cruise, Morgan Freeman, Olga Kurylenko, Andrea Riseborough, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, and Melissa Leo - Rated PG-13

There's no real sci-fi connection to be made with Chigurh, but he is kind of like a human version of a drone, isn't he?



Don't be fooled by that gun. He doesn't use it much.



Oblivion is a rarity among big sci-fi films. It isn’t a sequel, prequel, remake, reboot, or anything like that. Technically, it is an adaptation of a graphic novel, but it’s really just an adaptation of an idea that has yet to be used in a graphic novel. Oblivion is an original sci-fi film that doesn’t appear to be an attempt at starting a franchise. That fact alone gives it an edge.

A film doesn’t deserve a pass simply for not being a franchise, however. In this case, it is the icing on the cake of an interesting story filled with great visuals. It isn’t ground-breaking, but if you allow it, Oblivion can sink its hooks into you for the full two hours.

I’m told by some of my students (for those who don’t know, I am a high school English teacher) that I am wrong in liking Oblivion. A few of them walked out of the film because “it was so boring.” After chiding them for judging a movie they gave up on, I told them that the mystery of the film was interesting. Sure, there was a surprising lack of action, but good sci-fi doesn’t have to be all lasers and explosions. To be fair, Oblivion does feature some action, including one very impressive scene in which the camera follows a drone on an attack run, but it is certainly not an action movie. The best sci-fi has always found a balance between action and story. People will see Tom Cruise and expect that balance to tip more into the action territory than the story, but that’s not what happens.

Oblivion is more concerned with the world of the film and the mystery of it. I’ve been intentionally short about the plot thus far because the filmmakers have wanted to keep it as secretive as possible. I can’t rightly continue a review without giving a bit more of a synopsis, however. So if you want to watch this movie as fresh as possible, stop reading now. For those continuing to read, I won’t necessarily spoil the film for you, but I will be giving some specific plot details. Consider yourselves warned.

The mystery of the film is what kept me completely invested in it. Cruise plays Jack Harper, a maintenance man with a wiped memory who, along with his wife(?)/co-worker, fixes drones on a decimated planet Earth. Earth had been mostly destroyed years ago during an alien attack and the bulk of humanity now lives on Titan, the largest moon of Jupiter. The humans won the battle, but “lost the planet.” Now, a triangular mothership called the Tet has been left in Earth’s orbit, controlling the drones that protect the giant machines that salvage the rest of the planet’s power. The aliens were defeated, but there are some stragglers left, and it’s up to Harper to keep the drones working so the mission can succeed. As the movie begins, Harper and his partner have two weeks to go before they get to retire to Titan with the rest of humanity.

Oblivion is not, of course, a movie about maintenance only. Harper keeps having these dreams of a regular Earth, and he seems to have a fondness for memorabilia of the planet before the attack. As you can imagine, this leads to some problems and a few shocking discoveries. I’ll leave it at that, but if you’ve seen the previews, you know there’s more to this story than just Tom Cruise and his girlfriend eating future food and fixing killbots.

Since we don’t get to actually see this war that Cruise tells us about, we’re left to imagine how it all happened. More importantly, it allows us to be suspect of the claims he makes and wonder if there’s something he doesn’t know about. Trying to piece together the mystery of Oblivion is the most rewarding part of the film. Although it also leads to a weak point in the film in that a lot of story has to be told rather than shown, which can lead to a bit of confusion. I felt like I was paying close attention to the film, yet when I left there were still a few question marks. Oblivion might be one of those films that really benefits from repeat viewings.

Because of the use of drones, and since this is sci-fi, one can’t help but start applying current events to this film and trying to shoehorn some kind of allegory out of it. I won’t get into any theories here, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to posit an idea or two about what this movie might be saying about the use of unmanned drones and where that might take us as a society. That might politicize the movie a bit too much for some, but I’ve always felt that good sci-fi should at least attempt to hold a mirror up to society.



Is this what you want, America?!  Is it?!



If a mysterious setup doesn’t do it for you, then perhaps the visuals of Oblivion will. The ruins of Earth are interesting, but we’ve seen it all before. It’s the futuristic home and weapons that set this film apart. First, the house is something right out of director Joseph Kosinski’s other film, TRON: Legacy. That’s a compliment, by the way, because the house looks very cool in this film. Just wait until you see the pool. The weapons steal the show, though. Actually, it’s just the drones. They are photo-realistic and come across as truly dangerous creations.

The look of the drones and the film in general is impressive, but sound plays just as much of a factor. Once again, much like TRON, Kosinski uses sound extremely effectively. The drones have a distinct sound that adds to their menace. The music factors in a bit, too. The score by M83 was fitting, though nowhere close as a perfect match as Daft Punk was for TRON. Regardless, Kosinski is a director to pay attention to as he obviously has a distinct style and a love for sci-fi.

That love for sci-fi might lead people feeling a bit more negative towards this film. It’s impossible to watch this and not be reminded of other, arguably, better films. Of course you’ll be reminded of any post-apocalyptic films, but there are also elements of (possible SPOILERS) Moon and The Matrix. I was certainly making active comparisons to those films as I watched, but it didn’t leave me feeling negatively about Oblivion. Besides, how can you really call something a rip-off when literally everything that has been released in the past few decades has at least been influenced by other work? Anyway, Oblivion might seem a little familiar, but it’s still visually and intellectually stimulating. Plus, it features Tom Cruise being, well, Tom Cruise. And if you’re a fan of that, which I am, then you’ll come away pleased with this one. And if you don’t like it, at least take comfort in the fact that there (probably) won’t be any sequels or prequels.



Random Thought (SPOILERS)

Did I hear Morgan Freeman's character correctly?  About an army of Tom Cruises?  How awesome would that be?  I know I said I was cool with this film being light on the action, but can you imagine what that film would be like?  Okay, screw it.  I want a prequel.  Oblivion: Invasion of the Toms.



Can you imagine an army of these smirking psychos descending upon you?





"Looper"

Written and directed by Rian Johnson, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt, and Jeff Daniels - Rated R

 

"This time travel crap just fries your brain like an egg..."





Time travel movies are fascinating…and can be mind-blowing.  Wait, did I write, “mind-blowing”?  I meant irritating.  The concept can lead to fun, interesting, exciting, and gloriously complicated films, but it also makes your head hurt if you try to wrap your brain around every minute detail.  (Don’t worry.  I am not going to write a lengthy thesis about the ins and outs of time travel.  Go to the message boards if you want to read theories written by the time travel “experts” that populate IMDb.)  The films that use time travel to great success, like 12 Monkeys, The Terminator, or Back to the Future (to name a few), rarely waste much time with complicated plot points about time travel.  Those films feature a lot of explanation, 12 Monkeys being the closest film that could be complicated.  On the other end of the spectrum, you have films like Triangle, Timecrimes, and Primer.  These films, while great and thought provoking, can almost feel like homework assignments when you stop and think about them.  They become complicated because of all the alternate universes and timelines they create.  You almost need to take notes to keep track of it all.  (Sorry to the fans that find those films easy to follow.  They just feel more like work than play to me.)

 

Looper, the latest from writer/director Rian Johnson, thankfully falls in the former group.  It is an interesting, entertaining sci-fi movie that doesn’t get bogged down with the rules of time travel.  That is not to say that this is a simple film.  It is still about time travel and it still contains a paradox or two.  But if we’re willing to forgive The Terminator its paradox (sorry, I don’t buy any theories about how it is possible for John Connor to send his own father back in time to become his father) because of its awesomeness, then we should do the same for Looper. 

 

Looper is a great movie for many reasons, Rian Johnson being number one.  He has crafted such an interesting story.  In the relatively near future, time travel has yet to be invented, but it will be thirty years later.  Since it is impossible to get away with murder in the future, crime lords will use time travel to send undesirables into the past to be taken care of by hit men, or loopers.  Eventually, since time travel is so illegal in the future (and to protect the criminals’ own interests), a looper must close his own loop.  This means he must eventually kill his own older self.  All of their marks show up hooded, so a looper doesn’t know he has essentially killed himself until after the job is done. 

 

Enter Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), an addict (he's addicted to some future drug taken in the form of eye drops) who quietly goes about his business in the hopes of saving up plenty and eventually having a happy retirement.  Things go awry when Joe has to close his own loop.  His older self, or Old Joe, shows up without his hood on.  Being face to face with his older self (Bruce Willis) startles Joe, giving Old Joe enough time to distract Joe and get away.  Someone from the future being loose in the past is a huge problem for the mob, so young Joe must stop Old Joe no matter what.

 

What makes the plot of Looper more interesting is that Old Joe doesn't run simply because he wants to live longer.  He's there to kill the child version of the future's evil overlord.  I think it makes the film more interesting because it takes the common time travel scenario of going back in time to kill someone like, oh, let's go with the mainstay, Hitler, but adding the problem of said Hitler-type being a child.  You start to rethink things once you see a gun pointed at a child who has done nothing wrong...yet.  The moral implications of Old Joe's plan fascinated me and Willis did a fine job of showing steely reserve as he contemplated murder. 

 

Bruce Willis is right at home in a sci-fi film (he's even done the time travel thing a time or two, as well), and his scenes with Young Joe discussing time travel are great.  At one point it's almost as if he's predicting the internet message board arguments by yelling at Joe and telling him to forget about the time travel crap.  I'm with him on that; just enjoy the show. 

 

Joseph Gordon-Levitt makes it very easy to enjoy this film.  The first thing you notice is how different he looks in this film because they put makeup and prosthetics on his face to make look more like a young Bruce Willis.  The true joy of his performance, though, comes through his mannerisms.  His constant squint, that bark of a laugh; it's a great performance and it makes the film a lot of fun.  I only wish they shared more screen time. 

 

The rest of the cast is well-rounded.  Jeff Daniels plays a somewhat disinterested future immigrant in an interesting way.  Paul Dano is in his wheelhouse playing a nervous, stuttering looper.  Emily Blunt is does okay as a single mom on a farm.  Garrett Dillahunt has a great, tense scene.  And Pierce Gagnon is admirable if for no other reason than he is a child actor in a sci-fi film and he isn't annoying at all.  Kudos to the marketing team behind this film completely leaving the child out of the previews even though it is a vital part of the film.  I'm serious, this film probably did better because people were unaware that a child factored into the plot.

 

Speaking of marketing, this film is being touted as one of the “best action films” of the year.  But it's not really an action movie.  The few action scenes are great, though.  Willis's big action scene might go down as one of the best of his career, and that is certainly saying something.   

 

But Looper is not an action movie.  It's a sci-fi/time travel movie.  There's a great future world created with very few answers to any questions that might arise (and that's the way it should be, most of the time, in sci-fi).  There is a multiple time line aspect to the film, but it is handled in a very clear and stylish way.  In fact, the film is flat out stylish and it works on nearly every level.  I was left with only one issue with Rian Johnson's great film: I wanted more.  I wanted to see more of the world, I wanted more of the future world Bruce Willis came from, I wanted more one-on-one scenes with Gordon-Levitt and Willis, etc.  If the only issue you have with a film is that you wish there was more of it, then that is a good problem to have.  Check out Looper.  It might not be one of the best “action” movies of the year, but it is one of the best movies of the year.

"District 9"

District 9 - Directed by Neill Blomkamp, starring Sharlto Copley - Rated R


I'm giving this a Vader. I'm a sucker for great sci-fi.



District 9, the part faux documentary, part straight up sci-fi film, is one of the most enjoyable, compelling, thought provoking films of the year. This is what great science fiction films are all about. There are amazing visuals, the action is brutal and impressive, and there are mirrors held up to humanity.

There's another aspect of sci-fi that is vital, though: the story. District 9 is set in an alternate reality where a giant alien mothership has basically broken down above Johannesburg, South Africa in 1982. The aliens are extracted and put into "temporary" refugee camps. After years of rioting and corporate experiments, it's finally time to move the aliens, or prawns, as they are called in the film, to a new, secluded area. (Note: in the film it is stated that “prawn” is a derogatory term, but they never give an accepted name for the aliens, so I’m sticking with “prawn.”) Enter Wikus (newcomer Sharlto Copley), an overly polite field operative placed in charge of serving the prawns eviction notices. There's no reason to go into much more detail of the plot, suffice it to say that things obviously do not go smoothly during the eviction process. I knew very little about the film before I watched and I think I enjoyed it more because of it, so I don't want to ruin anyone else's time with this film, so I'll get into the world of prawn refugee camps.

This is something quite different for an alien film. The prawns are discovered in their mother ship malnourished and without clear leadership. They don't declare war on the world or anything like that, they just stay in the camps, sifting through garbage. The image of what would normally be a frightening alien chewing on a tire (apparently the prawn love chewing rubber) or crunching into a can of cat food (the prawns' favorite food) is both hilarious and original. Taking the scare factor out of the aliens, but leaving the mystery of how they came to be here is a brilliant move.

The idea of a helpless alien race is interesting enough, but the idea alone won't work on film. It has to look real, and this film looks great. The aliens, who are complete CG, look like they are actually in the environment. Part of that is helped by the documentary style, but the whole film isn't shot like that and the aliens look just as real in a steady shot as they do in a handheld shot. I also want to point out that while this him has documentary style, it is by no means as shaky as Cloverfield or The Blair Witch Project.

Back to the aliens; the design of the alien is a great counterbalance that creates disgust/fear and sympathy. The prawn's mouth of tentacles and spindly body give a creepy quality, but the eyes show feelings and give the alien's, dare I say, humanity.

The humanity of the aliens is what sets this film apart from your typical "when aliens attack" movie. Believe it or not, by the end of this film, you will probably be rooting for the aliens. That's not to say that humans are shown to be hatemongers and evil profiteers of another race's misery. Well, some are, like the weapon manufacturing corporation MNU (Multi-National United), who are only dealing with the refugee camps in an attempt to master alien weapon technology (which can only be used by the prawns). But I didn't sympathize with the aliens just because some of the human characters were evil. I was rooting for the prawns because the movie makes actual characters out of a few of them and their goal was more compelling to me than MNU's. It also helps that the prawns are given human names, like Christopher Johnson, even though they are incapable of speaking human languages. Little touches like that make me love this film.

The humanity and character qualities of the aliens are great, but this film still has a human as the main character. Wikus represents the middleground of prawns and humans. Early on, he's nice and all, but there's a kind of evil quality in the way that he treats the aliens. He seems to enjoy killing prawn fetuses far too much, laughing as they burn, and giving an unplugged feeding tube to a soldier as a souvenir of his "first abortion." So he's nice, but creepy. He changes a bit after experiencing life with the aliens (once again, I don't want to get specific) and he starts to see the humanity, or human-like qualities, of the prawns. Wikus basically represents the viewer's progression while watching the movie. At first, the prawns are kind of funny and pathetic and you don't really care if one of them gets shot during the evictions because it's an alien. But somewhere in the middle, you realize that the prawns are not nameless masses who live only to dig through garbage. They have personalities, they have children, and they have feelings.

This is where we get to the mirror held up to society. Obviously, this film offers a viewpoint on how refugees are treated in our world. At one point, a person being interviewed says, "We don't want them here. They must go. I don't know where. Just go." This is the mentality many people have when foreigners enter their land en masse. If people would witness the conditions that most refugees live in, they might think twice about hating them. But that's not the point of the film, so don't think that this sci-fi action movie is trying to preach to you. District 9 just has elements that make you think. It doesn't try to tell you what to think. That's the marking of a great film to me; a film that gives you something to discuss after it's over other than how cool it was when that guy got disintegrated. Although it is pretty cool when people get disintegrated in this movie.

District 9 attempts to be many things: creepy (an experiment/autopsy lab scene is chilling), funny (cat food), shocking (alien abortion and interspecies prostitution), thrilling (when the alien weapons first get used), heart breaking (Wikus' relationship with his wife), and thought provoking (the treatment of refugees). It succeeds on all accounts. But if you want a simple, succinct review of the movie, here goes. District 9 is just plain awesome.