By Colin Covert
FILM: Oblivion
CAST: Tom Cruise, Morgan Freeman, Olga Kurylenko, Melissa Leo
DIRECTION: Joseph Kosinski
The dystopian thriller Oblivion is a breathtaking collage of welcome originality and references to a huge common cultural bank of fantasy images and themes. It’s grandiose in scope and scale, attentive to important details like character and tone, and unafraid to tackle mature themes like love and loss, personal identity and redemption.
If there’s a better science-fiction blockbuster this year, I’ll count us lucky.
The film stars an intensely focused Tom Cruise as Jack Harper, a futuristic repairman tending to weaponised drones that guard the giant rigs mining earth’s final reserves of energy. The year is 2077, 60 years after an invasion by alien hordes devastated the planet. The remaining human population has relocated to one of Saturn’s moons. Only violent alien marauders remain on the surface, sabotaging the equipment extracting the planet’s last resources.
Yet Jack, five years after his mandatory memory wipe, can’t shake the feeling that this eerie brave new world is still his home. Who is that woman (Olga Kurylenko) who reappears so insistently in his dreams?
The film’s look is mesmerising, combining hypnotically sleek industrial design, workaday grubbiness and immense landscapes so stunningly barren they elicit tangible unease.
Director Joseph Kosinski (Tron: Legacy) and cinematographer Claudio Miranda (who shot Tron and went on to win an Oscar for last year’s Life of Pi) make the impossible impressively realistic. Jack and his communications officer, Victoria (Andrea Riseborough), live in a pristine, glass-walled loft that floats thousands of feet high above stunning cloud formations. Their solicitous superior, Susan (Melissa Leo), checks in regularly via video screen to check their status as “an effective team”.
Jack makes his service calls to the surface in a whizzy vehicle that looks like an Apple-designed commuter jet. “Only two more weeks, Jack, and we can finally leave and join the others,” Victoria cautions. “Please, don’t take any chances.” It’s as if someone is catering to his superficial needs in an effort to keep him from growing restless and inquisitive.
While Tron was a dramatically inert bite of eye candy and Cruise can emit a soulless vibe, here the star and director create gratifying emotional depth. A haunting loneliness pervades the story. When Jack visits a swathe of desert terrain pierced by the spire of the Empire State Building, or rappels through the blasted roof of the New York Public Library, the effect is genuine pathos. Even shots of flowers stubbornly struggling to evolve in this decimated environment pack a punch.
Jack, a former Marine, has a generous supply of action-hero skills (this is a Tom Cruise movie, after all) but he is at heart a high-tech grease monkey. He looks suitably worried, awed and surprised when he encounters the plot’s several bombshells.
Cruise is fully engaged in his scenes with Riseborough, whose cool composure erodes as their caretaker assignment grows more perilous. She infuses her jargon-heavy “Copy that” dialogue with a rich subtext of vulnerability and longing.
Even Leo, seen only as a smiling broadcast visage, imbues her honeyed tones with a hint of steely command, at once cloying and creepy.
Happily, Oblivion is not a remake, sequel, reboot, or the foundation for a projected franchise. It tells a self-contained mystery story that, for all its explosive action passages, feels like an epic episode of The Twilight Zone.
The film is rife with elements from its finest predecessors (Kubrick, Lucas, the Wachowskis and Pixar could be listed as creative consultants), but it has the spirit of a love letter to classic sci-fi, not an opportunistic mash-up.
Just as Lucas reached back to Flash Gordon serials for inspiration, Kosinski borrows wisely and well. Oblivion will not fade from memory for quite a while. — Star Tribune/MCT
A good-looking epic
By Roger Moore
FILM: Solomon Kane
CAST: James Purefoy, Max Von Sydow, Rachel Hurd-Wood, Pete Postlethwaite, Alice Krige
DIRECTION: Michael Bassett
There is but a faint hint of “barbarian” in the gloomy snowscapes, grim sword and scimitar duels and epic struggles of Solomon Kane, the film based on the further fantasy writings of Robert E Conan the Barbarian Howard.
Lacking a charismatic lead, struggling with its big themes of faith, the nonviolent moved to violence and a mercenary’s efforts to do one good thing to redeem his life of evil and murder, it’s not surprising this 2009 picture sat on the shelf for so long.
It’s a good-looking epic. But the looks weigh it down. There’s not a lot of life to it.
James Purefoy has the title role, a ruthless man of violence. His return from his travels to his home in 17th century England means he can lay low in a monastery. Or so he thinks. He’s too rough a character to last among monks. He sets to wandering, stumbles into some Puritans (Alice Krige and the late Pete Postlethwaite among them) and, failing to protect their pure and innocent daughter from the growing carnage of Satan’s legions, resolves to rescue their daughter Meredith (Rachel Hurd-Wood) and vanquish as many Satanic minions as he can in the process.
Writer-director Michael Bassett used World War I’s trenches as a setting for horror in Deathwatch and went on to direct the upcoming Silent Hill sequel. Here, an age of witchcraft, “when the world is plunged into darkness” (literally, in most scenes), he’s a bit too content to linger on his atmospheric sets with their gray and brown colour palette.
Purefoy, of “John Carter” and the TV series Rome (he was Mark Anthony), doesn’t help matters with a colourless leading man turn. It’s a performance built on a costume (Pilgrim’s hat, leather jerkin, cape and swords) and unwashed hair style. He is Christopher “Highlander” Lambert, the Next Generation - convincing in a fight, dull the rest of the time.
Bassett doesn’t help him out by his insistence on “lingering”. Solomon Kane has no pace to it.
The script entertains thoughts of the burden of guilt, the quest for redemption. Max Von Sydow plays Kane’s cruel nobleman father in flashbacks. But the film is such a flat exercise that no “big” moments, no Purefoy sneers, can raise Kane.
Howard might have been onto something, setting his avenging angel loose in post-Elizabethan England, with its ongoing Catholic-Protestant struggles — order in the cities, near anarchy in the provinces. Bassett and his production design team took care to imagine that world — within a budget.
But the movie they filmed in those settings lets them, and us, down. As franchise-starters go, this is strictly a non-starter.- MCT
(DVDs courtesy: Saqr Entertainment Stores, Doha)
