Oblivion is a dumbed down, dumb action movie with a incredibly prominent and out of place romance plot. The filmmakers realized that if people were told that the movie was a poorly done, poorly paced action movie intercut with a mildly interesting love story, they would have no target audience, since most women interested in romance movies would be bored during the ball numbing action scenes, and that their female lead never showed her breasts. With both genders bored by 50% of this movie, they decided to make Oblivion in to a sci-fi film for no reason other than to say that it was something deep.
Unfortunately, the writers, directors, actors, producers, and everyone except the sound designers didn't realize that a science fiction movie is required to make sense in order to be good. While most people, including me, can forgive small errors in a movie - such as the fact that a supercomputer such as HAL 9000 would require massive amounts of power and generate tremendous heat - the majority of the plot has to actually be not back-ass fucking stupid.
Oblivion is one of those movies that break down as soon as you leave the theater. During the movie I was at least distracted from the irritating flaws because the sound design was actually really well done - though most soundtracks were ripped from Mass Effect - but once I left the theater and returned to the real world, I immediately picked up on all the gaping logical flaws. I will list them after a brief description of the plot. Spoilers. Don't say I didn't warn you. Also, spoilers regarding the movie Moon which you should go watch instead of this.
What's the plot?
Oblivion takes place on Earth after the invasion of a supposed alien race. It follows the story of two people who are clearly brainwashed by an evil space pyramid that sends them orders to repair drones. The fact that they are brainwashed becomes evident within 15 minutes of the movie playing, since I have more than 1 functioning braincell and was not drunk during this movie.
Tom Cruise plays Jack Reacher. Wait, no. Harper. Whatever. Jack and the Bean Stalk Slayer is a repairman. He has a plane and an Elvis bobble head in his plane even though he never listens to Elvis. He discovers that not everything on the planet is as it seems when a bunch of humans crash on the surface and the clearly evil drones start killing them. He saves his old wife because she is a pretty white lady. Also I guess he loves her. Morgan Freeman is the only black person to survive in the grim darkness of the future. Its all white people.
Anyway, he gets captured by Morgan Freeman who tells him to reprogram a drone to send a nuclear bomb up in to the evil pyramid. Rather than clearly explaining the fact that the pyramid is evil, he says that Tom Cruise must go out in to the desert to figure out why the pyramid is evil. This is stupid for many reasons, mostly because Tom Cruise's fictional wife, the one who didn't divorce him, has a flight record which contains damning evidence relating to the evil space pyramid. This whole movie could have been resolved in 45 minutes.
Tom Cruise realizes everything is shit and then discovers that he is in fact a clone, one of many clones of himself which are grown by the space pyramid and replaced when they die. This is where the movie reveals that the filmmakers also saw Moon and thought that having a repairman who is cloned and had a memory wipe because of it was a cool plot. From then on the movie becomes a gigantic farce. The evil pyramid decides to check out the secret human base for no reason and somehow the nearly indestructible drone they have programmed to send the nuke is destroyed in the process. But the nuke is safe.
Tom Cruise then decides to fly up in to the pyramid himself and plants the nuclear bomb in the center of the ship, where the film rips off 2001 in more shots than I can count. Also the space pyramid is revealed to be tooled entirely to cloning Tom Cruise. Which is stupid. Its otherwise mostly empty. Because...uh. They wanted it to be big. Then he blows it up, and his wife is so sad she has a baby. Then the clone of Tom Cruise finds the wife rendering his character's sacrifice meaningless since an identical Tom Cruise with identical memories can just take over his life every time he dies, meaning that no amount of bravery is actually brave, since there are no real consequences to death.
Wut. Okay, what are these plot holes?
1. Tom Cruise is an astronaut. Being an astronaut takes a lot of work and is very specialized training. You can pretty much train to be an astronaut and maybe like an amateur cook. You cannot train to be an astronaut and a special forces agent. Tom Cruise's character was apparently also a super soldier, and an astronaut with enough of a personal life to meet another astronaut in casual clothes in the middle of New York, fall in love, and propose marriage. I guess people working to fly in space have plenty of free time.
2. If Tom Cruise is in fact a super genius and a super strong super man, then he should be able to figure out that the evil pyramid is clearly wiping his memories for no reason, because that is obvious to anyone with a brain. But he doesn't because then the movie would be over.
3. The gigantic floating space pyramid somehow knows enough about human biology to successfully clone humans without causing massive genetic problems or decay of any kind, since they appear to be perfect clones. The pyramid also knows how to implant memories in to the infinitely complex human brain with basically no flaws at all.
4. The drones are somehow able to track Tom Cruises biotrail in a dusty, windy environment hours after he passed by. They can do this because I guess drones are magic.
5. At one point Tom Cruise shoots a drone through its eye camera while flying a plane at mach 2, despite the fact that it is physically impossible for that to happen in even the most unlikely way, because at mach 2 the distance he would need to lead the bullet by would be hundreds of feet in front of the drone. Also apparently the camera is directly connected to the brain, which should be housed in a super armored core.
6. There is a swimming pool in the outside of Tom Cruise's space house, which has a see through bottom made of either glass or plastic. Given that this house is on a mountain with high wind speeds, at some point the stress of a constant moving house would have damaged the swimming pool, probably causing it to leak. This swimming pool should also not be located above a 2000 foot drop since it would cause panic attacks in any reasonable human.
7. Jaime Lannister is in this film. Yes, that's a plot hole.
8. Drones have engines powerful enough that they can move, stop, make 90 degree turns in fractions of a second. Yet these engines appear to only be at the back, which would only allow for normal flight movement, not TRON movement.
9. Nobody in the future found an RPG-7, despite the fact that even super space drones would probably be fucked if everyone hit them with rockets. Instead people use bullets, a much less efficient form of combat.
10. One of the central parts of the plot is that the moon was "destroyed." This caused tidal waves and earthquakes and shit. Now, I'm no expert, but the image that they show is a moon missing a large chunk of it, but the chunk is floating right in front of the moon. I'm fairly certain that the chunk would be pulled back in to the moon because of gravity, and that the actual loss of mass is negligible because the moon is sort of huge. Even if like...Australian sized pieces were blown off, it'd still just be a tiny bit of the moon. Its not like the whole moon disappeared.
11. The evil pyramid is only there to convert the entire ocean in to fuel, meaning that this movie also rips off Battlefield: Los Angeles for some reason. A better source of power would be the vast quantities of nukes that the humans launched after they realized that shit was going down. There is an interesting movie idea in an alien species who goes around provoking nuclear civilizations in to firing on them, just so they can harvest the missiles for fuel. That is a much more interesting movie than Oblivion.
12. Somehow the evil space pyramid has the raw materials to produce both ocean converting factories and thousands of clones, drones, and the supplies needed to run all of this bullshit. These are raw materials needed on a planetary scale.
13. The pyramid is there to suck up the ocean to turn it in to energy. How come it doesn't just use solar panels? Its big enough that it'd actually probably work better. Or what if it turned an unpopulated world in to energy? Or like an ice moon? Or Neptune? Gaseous planets have a lot of fuel. Why oceans on a populated planet that can resist? Why? Who cares?
14. If the evil space pyramid has massive numbers of hyperadvanced drones, why bother making clones of a human that could one day turn on the pyramid and destroy it? why not just send down drones and murder everyone's face? Then just take the ocean water. Because everyone is dead.
15. Tom Cruise tells his space wife that Titan is the largest moon of Saturn when he knows she's an astronaut.
16. The final confrontation between Tom Cruise and the evil pyramid finished in two lines. First the evil space pyramid, PYR9000 says "I created you. I am your god!" Then Tom Cruise says "Fuck you Sally." This is not only incredibly stupid, but also brings up weird questions about the space pyramid. How does the space pyramid have the concept of what a god is? God is not a universal concept, ants don't think of god, its really just a human thing because we tend to think that way, whether or not its true.
A giant computer that can just create everything wouldn't really have a concept of a god because it'd never have a want. Religion rose out of the need for order in a relatively chaotic world, or at least the belief in the divine of any nature did. When you're a super computer that hasn't actually visited earth before, the concept of an all powerful being who is perfectly ordered would be foreign to you as a creature of worship.
Really the space pyramid should've asked what a god was, because it wouldn't have known. Actually, how does it know how to speak English? It's encountered two humans in person, ever. I guess it learned from television. Or something stupid.
17. Tom Cruise manages to save his space wife from a bullet that magically appeared in her torso using a medical spray and a magnet.
18. The giant space pyramid repurposes its entire inner sanctum - the place where the central evil alien LIVES - to a clone growing facility. Does it do this for every single planet it goes on? Every single time? That's massively inefficient. Also why would you want to look at that? No wonder its so evil. Just get it like a poster or something. I've got some spare posters, it can have them.
19. Somehow in the course of 60 years the radiation from nuclear war has totally cleared up with no consequences for anyone. This is after total nuclear war, which would have also destroyed nuclear power plants causing widespread radiation. Somehow this radiation didn't interfere with communications at all, despite the fact that a small gorge will stop radio contact.
20. Nobody has cell phones.
21. At no point in the pyramid's history did any species reprogram a nuke to destroy it. Ever. Only humans. Why? Because. Shut up.
22. There is no reason for Tom Cruise to love his space wife because they've been separated for so long. His space wife was separated for relatively no time at all since she was in stasis. When she first sees her husband, she acts surprised, when really she should have thought it was normal, since to her no time has passed.
23. Tom Cruise brings Morgan Freeman aboard the evil space pyramid to blow it up. Morgan Freeman is the leader of the surviving humans, and seems to be effective and well liked. There is no reason why he should be up there, since he would have made for a better leader than anyone else.
24. There are still thousands of Tom Cruise clones to clean up after, who now have no food or water and all secretly love Tom Cruise's space wife. There's at least 52 of them.
25. I can't get over how stupid that eye shot was, holy god.
26. The theater I was in smelled like pee. I know this probably wasn't the movie's fault, but still. Pee.
EDIT: 27. This film cost 120,000,000 dollars to make, yet they couldn't hire a decent screenwriter.
Jesus.
I know. This isn't really nitpicking either. These are big issues with the movie because they're just these gaping logical flaws in the narrative which break my suspension of disbelief immediately.
If this was a worse film, where it was a cheesy, hokey mess of dumb ass bullshit, then I wouldn't care. If it was just an action movie, then no, I don't care if the plot makes sense, so long as the plot takes me where the action goes and doesn't not make sense. Oblivion tries to sell itself as a serious film, and so its held to big boy standards. Sorry.
Also, maybe this was just the projector, but at one point the framerate on the film changes and it looks like shit. Maybe it was a filter change or maybe it was framerate, but it suddenly started looking awful. I'm going to blame that on the theater, but if anyone else sees it and notices the same thing towards the end of the movie, let me know.
No but seriously, this is just Moon with a bigger budget and way less quality.
DONE
Oblivion - Fucking dogshit.
NOT DONE
Renoir Apollo 18 Meek's Cutoff That Kind of Girl
FAN REQUEST FRIDAY
Come on people, make me hurt.
I walked out liking this movie. I feel bad after reading this...
Oh shit. I realized I never even got to talk about the sound design. I could write a paper on the bad parts of this movie. The sound design was cool. It tricks you in to thinking that some scenes are exciting when they really aren't. People who aren't aware of how much a soundtrack plays in to your emotions will be tricked by the sound team, who know their jobs very well. But no this movie is still crap. Olga Kurylenko is actually attractive though, and not a terrible actress. I could see her in more stuff. She just has bad luck with movies. I really could write much more about this film but the review is already massively long.
While I agree that the movie had glaring plot holes, mediocre acting, and a terrible script (every time she said "we are still an effective team" I cringed), the art direction was fantastic. I loved the landscape, ship designs, the lakehouse, the homemade guns and armor, etc. Most of them made no sense what-so-ever technically, but the art direction was cohesive and beautiful. I wish more sci-fi movies invested the same effort into creating new designs for ships and such. Also, because I can't help myself, I've added some more technical holes... 28. The plane thingy has a tail rotor... and independently rotating side engines. One engine tilted forward + one engine tilted back = turn. See the V-22 Osprey for how this works. 29. Drones can insta-gib anyone, except Morgan Freeman who is the only one to ever be wounded... 30. Drones can insta-own everyone in dark rooms at breakneck speed but A. can't shoot down the plane thingy and B. need to emit a glowy light scan thing in every other situation except when its on a rampage. 31. Lets reprogram a drone to destroy the tet... and then slowly wheel it the 10 feet out our front door 32. Mission control goes offline... what? 33. Fusion generators take up the space of a watermelon, can be switched on and off at whim, and explode violently. Fusion requires HUGE amounts of energy to start and crazy containment methods. At the end when they combine it with plutonium to make a hydrogen bomb, that's a little more believable, but... 34. Why is the original spacecraft powered by weapons grade plutonium? 35. Why would humanity move to Titan? Just because it may be the most hospitable place for life doesn't mean its hospitable to OUR kind of life... It would be far easier to move humanity to Mars. <-- This would be a moot point if Jack Harper and Vica didn't believe it. 36. The human insurgents seemingly shoot down these drones every day, and yet they don't have rpgs (way simpler to make than homemade guns) or other actually effective weapons. 37. Drones, built by an alien, can be reprogrammed by people to do a complex task like flying to space, getting through whatever docking protocols there are and then navigating through a space the programmer has never seen before. 38. The test is like 80% empty... what is it using all this energy for? Housing crazy raves? Ah, thank you all who endured that, I just needed to get some technical objections off my chest. Still, a decent-ish movie.
39. How do the stealth suits actually work, and if they work well, how come the humans can't just plant explosive devices on the sides of the drones? 40. What is the drone armor made of where it takes no dents from bullets yet can be crushed by a rock falling on it? 41. What's the point of the stealth suits if the drones can just detect people anyway? 42. If the drones can detect minute biosigns that have been cold for days and days, how come they can't detect people behind small rocks? 43. Why would the drones be built with vertically rotating gun mounts that have an otherwise very limited range of movement? The drones primarily face targets which are on the ground or flying level with them; a horizontal turret would be much more effective for dispatching targets on the ground without requiring the drone to constantly turn back and forth. 44. How did the evil space pyramid blow up the moon in the first place when it doesn't appear to have any weapons at all? 45. If the evil space pyramid has a laser that can blow a continent sized chunk out of the moon, how come it can't just fire at earth, wipe out all life on the planet by destroying nuclear power plants, then send down its drones when everyone is dead to harvest the hydrogen? 46. If the pyramid could manufacture advanced robotics, how come it didn't just make robot soldiers rather than clones? It can clearly create an artificial intelligence powerful enough for a drone to individually target humans, detect threats, and operate in a very enclosed space at breakneck speeds, so how come it can't just transfer memories and personality in to a robot soldiers? They would be infinitely cheaper to manufacture than clones and also be very durable. 47. How come the escape pod is capable of escaping the tractor beam when the ship with the much larger engine cannot? Wouldn't it just get tractored in to the ship too? 48. When did the evil space pyramid learn that human beings enjoyed have pools floating above several hundred feet of air? 49. How come the evil space pyramid set up water harvesting zones that were basically right next to each other in visible distance from an airplane? How did Tom Cruise never once see any of these towers? 50. Why is there a lightning storm that doesn't ever stop? 51. I'm not scientists, but if you were creating gigantic water harvesting plants, then you'd be fucking with the surface water first and presumably the water closest to the ocean floor last. Now, again, I'm not scientists, but the water that's on the surface tends to be the warmest, right? So by removing all of that water you would actually be removing a great deal of what keeps the planet warm, since warm ocean air would not be rising. Warm, moist air contributes to weather patterns including severe thunderstorms. So wouldn't having the water harvesters stop any major severe lightning storm from happening in the first place by fucking with the weather? 52. Where the fuck are they in New York that there is a gigantic desert only miles from the city? I understand that its a nuclear holocaust, but seriously? So if they're located in the mountains they are between 50-100 miles from the shore. Yet they're shown crossing the Brooklyn Bridge as sort of the border between the "Safe" zone and the "radiation" zone. This is despite the fact that they are clearly located on a mountain when you see there house, the nearest mountain being WEST of the city, not EAST of it. EAST of the bridge is the bay. But they are clearly on a flat shore. So they must either be down by Staten or Long Island, since those are the two closet flat shorelines. If we are assuming their borders are done relatively evenly, and not weird stretches of land, then they are covering tens of thousands of square miles per individual clone. I'm not even from New York and I know how bad their geography is. This is basic research for a movie taking place in a single setting. Yes, you can have errors and it'd be okay if you went from Staten Island to the Giants Stadium, but when the House is shown on the mountains and they travel all over the fucking place you have to start explaining where people are. I shouldn't have to spend 20 minutes trying to figure out where people are relative to New York City.
I do love these reviews. A Few Things About Oblivion Oblivion started life as an idea of Joseph Kosinski's. Joseph Kosinski started his Hollywood life as one of David Fincher's acolytes, doing 2nd unit and the like and working with The Director's Bureau on commercials. He got his first bump with TR2N (is that what we're calling it) which, from Disney's point of view, wasn't terrible. Joseph Kosinski is well aware that spec screenplays don't sell worth a shit but also aware that he can't write. So he sort of scribbled down some ideas and gave them to people he paid to write them as a book with pictures in it which he never had any intention of selling. This impressed people enough that it sparked a bidding war and Oblivion sold as a movie without ever being a screenplay. So now it needed a screenplay. But movies don't work like that any more, at least, not at that scale. So while they were out hammering on the screenplay set designers and storyboardists and character designers and this whole army of people started working on Oblivion even though they didn't quite know what it was about yet. One of them was a buddy of mine, who told me "man, what we've seen so far ain't so good." Lo and behold, shortly before Christmas two years ago Disney told everyone to go home because the script was terrible and they were putting the whole project on hold. Fast forward 9 months and the project is back on. My buddy opted for Oblivion (because he knew the people, and because he knew they were serious because when they killed Nemo it stayed dead) over Ender's Game. He still wasn't sold on it, but it happened. I haven't seen it. I wasn't blown away by TR2N (which a number of my friends worked on, who advised me not to watch it) and I find any "story by committee" movie is invariably terrible. This is one reason why I work on tiny, shitty movies rather than reaching for the brass ring that is Hollywood - at least you get to do something. Incidentally: - Soundtrack: any songs used in a film that can be sold elsewhere (James Bond title songs like Adele's Skyfall) - Score: musical orchestrations hat exist solely for the film (like the James Bond theme) - Sound Effect: Any single clip connected diegetically to on-screen action - Sound Design: the craft of creating sound effects - Foley: footsteps, clothing rustle, etc. Example: "JTHipster praised the sound design of Oblivion but said nothing about the score by M83. For Friday, you have a multiple choice: A) Barbarella because you haven't gotten to it B) Zardoz because it's John Boorman's take on the Barbarella era and is fucking awesome C) Altered States because fuckin' Ken Russel directing Paddy Chayevsky's last script D) The Hunger because it's Tony Scott's first and it's in the same zone and it's got David Bowie and Bauhaus in it E) CQ because it's Roman Coppola's take on this vintage of cinema therefore it's doubly meta F) Logan's Run because c'mon. So long as we're on the 70's psychotronic tip, why not.
I'm really confused by Hollywood screenplay writing. Why do so many movies have shit scripts? Why couldn't they have paid a writer with a good track history? The writer's cost is a tiny fraction of the overall budget, yet it makes up a massive proportion of the impression on the viewer. Hell, aren't there enough starving writers in Hollywood that they could throw out a pitch and hire the best screenplay put forward among multiple independent writers? My close friend moved back down to LA this year to pursue a career of writing and directing movies. The impression I got from discussing it with him was that there are plenty of brilliant writers down there and it's a cut-throat world to make a living...yet I also feel that it's normally the shit that floats to the top.But movies don't work like that any more, at least, not at that scale. So while they were out hammering on the screenplay set designers and storyboardists and character designers and this whole army of people started working on Oblivion even though they didn't quite know what it was about yet. One of them was a buddy of mine, who told me "man, what we've seen so far ain't so good." Lo and behold, shortly before Christmas two years ago Disney told everyone to go home because the script was terrible and they were putting the whole project on hold.
So. Let's say you have a brilliant idea. Let's say you write the perfect script. Let's say everyone you've ever shown it to says it's perfect and needs no changes. Now let's say "is it so brilliant that it needs no changes before we spend one Hundred MILLION DOLLARS on it?" I'll bet you can find something to tweak. I'll bet everyone else can find something to tweak, too. In fact, I'll bet every person with any authority to tweak is going to tweak, just so they can continue to have the authority to tweak. So what you end up with is the story that managed to survive being tweaked by every single person who touched it. And oh, by the way, if you refuse to tweak, it's no longer your script. Screenwriters will literally rewrite lines that don't need rewriting because if they don't rewrite enough lines, they won't get credit. And if they don't get credit, they won't get residuals (money). Assistants will literally suggest changes that don't need to be changed because they want to remind their bosses that they have a 'fresh look." Studio heads will greenlight movies their predecessors killed and kill movies their predecessors green-lit just to prove they're studio heads. Take a script. Throw it on the ground in the middle of the parking lot. Now take out a megaphone and announce that everyone with a designated parking spot (and half the people in general parking) on the Warner Brothers lot are invited to come piss on it. Everything that hasn't washed away from being pissed on throughout the entire development process (and I AM LEGEND was in "development" from 1979 until 2007) is your script. There's your movie.I'm really confused by Hollywood screenplay writing. Why do so many movies have shit scripts?
Ah, so less bad starting script, more bad ending script. Makes sense, though you'd think someone would pay attention when the end result is continually shit. Or does it not really matter that much, in the final profits? Jebus, that makes it well older than me.and _I AM LEGEND_ was in "development" from 1979 until 2007
| Makes sense, though you'd think someone would pay attention when the end result is continually shit. Or does it not really matter that much, in the final profits?| Blade Runner and Porky's both came out in 1982. Blade Runner made $33m. Porky's made over $100m. Which one had a sequel? This is a fun toy. See for yourself.
And if you choose (F) may I wholeheartedly recommend a double feature? Logan's Run came out on June 23, 1976. It represents "before" in terms of Hollywood. Star Wars came out on May 25, 1977. It represents "after." These two movies were released less than a year apart. I think most people don't really understand how absolutely earth-shattering Star Wars truly was because they do not have a context for it - but Logan's Run provides it in an extremely decisive way. Watch Logan's Run, write it up, then watch Star Wars. It's a hell of a ride.
Update then. Sound design was acceptable. Score was great. Felt like Mass Effect. Also man if a director can't write for shit he shouldn't really even pay people to write it unless he's ready to kill his baby. Your friend may have made the right choice. Ender's Game is going to be a train wreck.
"Harry Potter in Space." I shit you not. "Yeah, guys, come work on this movie. It's pretty much gonna be Harry Potter in Space."
Oh my fucking god. No, its not one alien attack, its two, both of which did not, in fact, hit Earth. The first invasion was a primitive first encounter, the second invasion was stopped only my Major Rackham. I might have misspelled his name, haven't done my yearly reading yet. The kids aren't recruited to fight back, they're recruited to become part of the military. Battle School is a training grounds for Officers, and they train children from early ages because of how much of a threat the much larger, more technologically advanced alien civilization poses. Its not at all Quidditch, and its not at all a light saber battle. The Battle Room is a mostly empty room with boxes in it, where kids play what sort of amounts to a space lasertag that is much more complicated. The point of the battle room isn't to be action and its not to be competitive, its to teach the kids how to function as a team and how to select leaders. Its disguised as a game because children have a love of games and competition that's not tempered by age. Its not. Fucking. Quidditch. There isn't even a ball. No, he's actually been planned to be the genius all along. He was specifically genetically engineered to be a compromise between his very aggressive brother and his very passive and loving sister, and was viewed by some very high ups to be the last best hope for Earth. He was also never told he was going to destroy the alien race because why the fuck would you tell the kid he was going to commit xenocide?! Fuck. I'm going to have to review this. I'm going to hate every second of that goddamn movie.The storyline begins on Earth after an alien attack, when gifted children are recruited by a government desperate to fight back.
The kids are taught a competitive game that’s a cross between the Quidditch matches of Harry Potter and the Jedi light saber battles from Star Wars.
A young boy emerges as a genius strategist, and the planet’s best hope to destroy the alien Formic race.