Oblivion, In Which Tom Cruise Bravely Saves The World… We Think.

Science fiction: it’s the bastion of a) lonely nerds and b) a million-and-one confusing plot points. In the case of Oblivion, Tom Cruise’s new post-apocalyptic epic, I hoped I could just take director Joseph Kosinski’s caring hand and trust he didn’t leave me confused and stranded somewhere in outer space, but alas, he did. As the kids at school regularly reminded me, I have pea-brains, but still, I don’t need to hear it from a Tom Cruise movie.

Kosinski was responsible for 2010’s Tron: Legacy, a visually slick film that still left many viewers cold and wishing they were just watching The Dude bowling instead. In general, Oblivion’s more of the same. It opens with an impressive montage highlighting Earth’s fate following an alien invasion 60 years ago (a semi-buried Brooklyn Bridge, a half-smashed rollercoaster), like someone blew up the moon and accidentally killed all the world’s amusement parks. It’s all vibrantly soundtracked to M83’s booming main theme, a synth-heavy version of ‘Nessun Dorma’. The film soars in these sombre early moments, even though the only other thing there to complement the lush visuals and killer score is a whole bunch of boring expository science talk. Bleep, bloop, bleep, bloop.

Tom Cruise plays Jack Harper, a corporate crony and drone mechanic who’s one of the few remaining people on Earth (everyone else has been sent far, far away on a mothership headed for one of Saturn’s moons). Jack and his flame-haired companion Victoria (Andrea Riseborough), a fellow employee assigned to watch his back and report to Mission Control, spend their time in an impressive free-standing tower that looks like a Frank Lloyd Wright design situated above the clouds. When not tag-teaming on drone recovery excursions, they take showers together, enjoy odd candlelit dinners (it’s nice to know you can still get bottles of shiraz in a post-apocalyptic future), and make intensely romantic sex-times in a completely see-through pool. What a house, it’s like the Playboy Mansion of the future. I have no idea why anyone would wanna give that up for a tedious life on one of Saturn’s shitty moons.

Outside this blissful domesticity, Jack’s tasked with monitoring the drones that are protecting some other gigantic machines that are extracting Earth’s remaining resources ahead of their departure. Oddly, he does this in a flying aircraft that looks a lot like a giant cock and balls. It could be Kosinski’s attempt at some sly Kubrickian sexual innuendo (there’s another striking image later on where Jack’s spacecraft enters a floating mothership like sperm into an egg), but it also could just be my filthy mind.

During one of these routine sojourns, Jack’s attacked by rummaging scavengers, some weirdos who run around in scary, floppy leather masks, but later just turn out to be Morgan Freeman (whose goofy glasses instantly lend a steampunk vibe to the proceedings) and his accumulated gang of drop-out humans. The guys don’t like each other, and do a bit of fighting. Kosinski’s action scenes are shot like video games, the viewer in Jack’s point of view or hovering just over his shoulder. They’re slow and clunky, drowning in CGI, although one culminates in a great shot of Jack looking like he’s climbing out of Rodin’s gates of hell.

The sinister possibilities of technology hover throughout Oblivion, much like in Kosinki’s Tron: Legacy. In that film, Garrett Hedlund got hilariously trapped in a neon blue video game with a shitload of Daft Punk records. Here, the machines are wild and unpredictable, drones that confuse easily, threaten to attack their masters, and can’t be overridden. A latter scene features a hefty drone being tied down in chains, like a hulking King Kong, and even Jack’s slick white motorbike (which he rides awesomely, like a Scandinavian Akira) is at one point seen secured to a rock with a leash.

As an antidote to all the hi-tech nonsense, Jack regularly escapes to an idyllic wood cabin, where he has Earth-ly dreams about a mysterious girl, shoots hoops, slips the needle on some fuzzy Procul Harum vinyl, and reads classic literature (on paper!) by the light of a glowing Edison bulb. He even sports some slick ‘80s aviator glasses, the film’s double nod to Jack’s lingering pre-war humanity and Cruise’s iconic movie mythology. Jack’s secret corner of the world is a hipster paradise, and taps into today’s increasing retro nostalgia amidst all our tech-y overload (the irony being, though, that the film is filled with more CGI flourishes than most PC games).

As the film progresses, it starts to borrow quite liberally from Duncan Jones’ 2009 sleeper, Moon, and, to use a word I learnt from Madonna, gets reductive, although we do get to see Tom Cruise beat the shit outta himself in a desert. That was fun. But then, somewhere around that scene, I ran out of my delicious Chatime premium pearl milk bubble tea and subsequently spent the rest of the film staring sadly through the big-screen at a story I’d lost track of almost an hour ago. Fuckin’ sci-fi; you really need a nerd’s brain to get it.

Oblivion is out in cinemas nationwide right about… now.