Morgan Freeman gets second billing in Oblivion, but he doesn’t show up until halfway through the film, and even then he’s not in the film nearly as much as the other main cast members. Sure, his name recognition is much bigger than Andrea Riseborough, Melissa Leo or Olga Kurylenko, but each of those three actors play roles that get more screen time and are pivotal to the film. This is key as Oblivion only has a few characters in it with vast expanses of desolate wasteland as both setting and plot device.
The Blu-ray case proudly exclaims Scot Mantz of “Access Hollywood” declared the film “A Mind-Blowing Epic.” I wonder how many films Scott Mantz has seen. I wasn’t surprised by the twists in the film’s plot, let alone having my mind blown.
All this makes me wonder if the film would have been a bigger success if it was marketed differently, or if perhaps it wouldn’t have succeeded at all. Oblivion was a box office success and now arrives on home video with a number of special features. But the heart of the package is the film, which is good, but I just get the feeling it was horribly misrepresented.
Tom Cruise is Jack, tasked with a 5 year mission to guard the terraforming pods cleaning Earth of leftover radiation from the war with aliens – a war that wound up destroying our moon. With the moon gone, the tides are all out of whack, and with the earth shifting, more earthquakes, and… you get the idea.
So Jack is on a desolated planet making sure things are working properly, fending off the last remnants of the aliens and all the time in communication with his partner, Vicki (Andrea Riseborough). She stays at the base in communication with mission control (Melissa Leo) who guides the overall mission. Where does Morgan Freeman’s character come in? Well, that’s a bit of a spoiler.
Mind-blowing? No. Epic? Not really (my benchmark is Lawrence Of Arabia – that’s an epic). So what is Oblivion? A solid science fiction film that is well made. Isn’t that what we want? Joseph Kosinski, who directed Tron: Legacy not only directed Oblivion but also co-wrote the script. There’s a solid look to the film, a tangible reality created. The score works with the sparse visuals as well.
Did I like Oblivion? Yes, I’m glad to have seen it. It was an enjoyable couple of hours.
On Blu-ray we get a solid picture and audio and several decent bonus features as well. One of the best is the film with an isolated score track. There isn’t enough of this type of thing in my opinion, and Oblivion is a film which definitely deserved this. An audio commentary with Cruise and Kosinski is interesting and informative, but there is mention of a graphic novel, and like the marketing, is an anomaly in that I can’t find any record of there being one ever published. A decent “making of” feature runs a little under an hour and is broken up into 5 different parts and then a couple of snipped scenes round out the offerings.
Oblivion is a decent film that reminds me of 2001. While not as epic in scale or scope, it has that “classic” storytelling feel to it. I look forward to Kosinski’s next project.