In a thrilling epic directed by Joseph Kosinski, Tom Cruise must accomplish an impossible mission by pushing his aircraft to the limits and defying orders. No, it’s not 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick, because in this movie, the planet Earth has already been decimated. But nine years before Cruise and Kosinski’s collaboration yielded blockbuster gold with the critically acclaimed Top Gun sequel, the pair of them teamed up for the unfairly maligned Oblivion. Eleven years after its release, Oblivion represents an interesting moment for science fiction cinema, a time in which concepts that would probably be turned into entire TV series were compacted into slick films, light on realism, and heavy on relentlessly pacing and awesome production design.
Oblivion is not the best Tom Cruise sci-fi action flick ever, and that’s mostly because Minority Report exists. But despite some of its textual silliness, this slick film still delivers the goods, even if, today, it feels more like a Black Mirror episode with a big budget, rather than an entire film. It’s just hit Netflix and is certainly worth a look if your memories of it are as hazy as the mandatory memory wipe Tom Cruise has before the movie begins.
Oblivion is a mystery box movie that relies on erased memories and premises given to the audience that later turn out to be lies. In a lengthy voice-over, we meet Jack Harper (Tom Cruise), a technician tasked with repairing deadly drones. Earth has been decimated and abandoned by humanity, following an invasion from aliens. We’re told that Jack and Vika (Andrea Riseborough) are one of several crews left behind on Earth guarding large hydro rigs “which convert Earth’s seawater into fusion energy.” If you think this sounds like implausible technobabble that can’t possibly justify Jack and Vicka hanging out together on a platform super high up in the sky, you’re correct. This corny setup is a feature of Oblivion, not a bug. The slick post-apocalyptic world seems too good to be true because it is.
About halfway through Oblivion, the movie starts dropping several twists, all of which are utterly justified by the thin backstory we’re told from the start. Thanks to the appearance of human scavenger leader Malcolm (Morgan Freeman), and lost astronaut Julia (Olga Kurylenko) Oblivion gets even more exposition, but this time it’s background information to contradict what we thought we knew about the essential set-up. The mind game that the viewer has to play with themselves is buying into the idea that you’d be deceived by the first set of facts and that the second truth is somehow more plausible.
Considering it’s all outrageous when you step back at all, what makes Oblivion so interesting is that the twists rely on splitting hairs. Of course, this kind of alien invasion is absurd fiction — but this other, slightly different alien invasion is 100 percent legit. In a sense, you could invert the two competing premises in Oblivion and have a thematically similar movie, though perhaps one that isn’t as enjoyable.
Because, like many Tom Cruise sci-fi action flicks, Oblivion feels like a better movie than it actually is. It would make a fairly cliché short story and an underwhelming novel. Funnily enough, director Joseph Kosinski clearly knew this; though he pitched it as a graphic novel, he later revealed that was only done as a pretense to get a movie deal.
The only medium for Oblivion that makes any sense at all is a film with a tight runtime of exactly two hours. Kosinski wastes zero time in this movie, proving he’s one of the best directors of action movies right now. The twisty plot constantly keeps you guessing, and if you’re only half paying attention, you’ll be utterly confused by the end. Superficially, this makes the movie seem super-smart, which isn’t entirely true. A super-smart movie wouldn’t need to hide as many things from the audience to make it work and would have characters that exist to do more than just ask questions or deliver new, hidden pieces of exposition.
But, Oblivion is that rare sci-fi movie that is better crafted than written, more reliant on a finely tuned, relentless narrative engine than common sense. If transformed into a modern-day prestige sci-fi drama — like the many great ones on Apple TV+ — Oblivion wouldn’t work simply because it would run out of twists and lies too quickly. What makes the film great is that its basic contrivance is the basis of its literal story, and it spends just enough time in this world to make you believe it. Tom Cruise only slows down to get new pieces of the mystery, and then, as soon as possible, he’s up and running again.
