Friday, August 1, 2014

Oblivion (2013)

Director: Joseph Kosinski
Writers:  Karl Gajdusek, Michale deBruyn, Joseph Kosinski
Cast:       Tom Cruise, Morgan Freeman, Andrea Riseborough, Olga Kurylenko

A veteran assigned to extract Earth's remaining resources begins to question what he knows about his mission and himself.

The film is based on Joseph Kosinski's unpublished graphic novel of the same name. I was not too keen to watch the film because the director was also associated with Tron and it looked like another one of those typically loud Tom Cruise action film. Plenty of people hate Tom Cruise because of his personal life and his perfect portrayal of annoyingly cocky characters  on screen. Am not one of them and I rate him as one of the best to play such characters. People generally remember him for the Mission Impossible films, Top Gun  and for his frequent collaborations with Steven Spielberg in the early 2000s. For me his best roles were in Magnolia, Collateral, Eyes Wide Shut and Rain Man and I need to watch Vanilla Sky again. The thing with him is that if you take out the MI films, Cruise tend to pick some interesting films even if they are of big budgets. This habit of him has put himself in a dangerous position of being nether here nor there in the present day film industry. The block busters nowadays tend to be unoriginal leave your brains out kind and Cruise tend to act in original films save for the MI franchise. The good films generally come from the sub 20 million dollars budget levels and that is why am saying that Tom Cruise is kind of in the middle of these two extremes. It is encouraging that he is still doing some original stuff with Oblivion and Edge of Tomorrow but his box office attractiveness in US has waned and both films did better overseas. But am extremely disappointed to see his future projects to be MI-5, Top Gun 2 and Jack Reacher 2. I would really love him to do a McConaissance before its too late.

Oblivion has great production quality and it takes its audience to be intelligent with the sort of twists and turns it takes without being too expository. It is a great watch and you will think about the plot holes only after you finished watching. I don't see any other purpose for cloning a human to just kill all other humans than merely being a silly plot twist. It would remind people of Duncan Jones' excellent debut feature 'Moon'. Overall the film is a real good one-time watch and is certainly better than the reviews it got.

Rating: 3.5/5

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