Oblivion

When you hear that Tom Cruise and his partner Andrea Riseborough had their memories wiped five years ago for some bullshit security reason, you can be sure that something is rotten in the state of Oblivion. Someone is lying to them about what had really happened. The story is that aliens arrived about seventy years ago, and we fought them to a standstill, and then won. But winning had a terrible cost. Earth has been re-engineered, and Tom and Andrea are some of the last humans on the planet, supervising the removal of anything of value, which seems to be water and energy. Everyone is to move to Titan one day soon. Yeah, right.

I won’t get any further into the plot, or the reveal of what’s really going on. It’s a serviceable plot, I guess. It’s no surprise to anyone that a remnant of humans are still alive, headed by Morgan Freeman. Some of the details of the real story are interesting. But it’s all pretty lightweight, and the ending suffers from too much of what I call the Star Wars PRESS HERE TO DESTROY THE DEATH STAR cop-out. This is the stupid idea that a gigantic structure like the Death Star, or here the Tet, are vulnerable if one person can get a ridiculously small package into just the right place … well, you know the story. Yeah, right.