Taking place in the future, Joseph Kosinski's Oblivion tells the story of Jack Harper, a droid repair specialist whose stationed on an evacuated Earth. Jack is part of a massive undertaking to extract the vital resources from Earth which has been decimated after decades of war with an alien race, who still scavenges the planet. With Jack's mission nearly complete, he will soon be able to join Earth's other survivors on a lunar colony orbiting Saturn. After a crash landing in which Jack rescues a human from the wreckage of her spacecraft, Jack begins to realize a connection between the woman and his past memories. Unbeknownst to him at first, her arrival triggers a series of events which will force Jack to question everything he has ever known. Joseph Kosinski's Oblivion is a rather original science fiction epic about redemption and the power of the human spirit. With Tron Legacy, Kosinski announced himself as a visionary director and Oblivion further establishes that fact. The film is stunning from a visual perspective, with Kosinski and company doing a great job at designing this living and breathing world. Everything in this world which they've created just feels right from the the production design being clean and sterile, to how technology is inventive yet practical. Oblivion is a film that makes it clear early on that something is wrong with Jack's world as he knows it, giving the viewer tons of memory-infused flashbacks. We are never given enough to figure out exactly what is going on but it is apparently early in the film that Jack's character is being deceived. Personally, I thought the whole film could have been more subtle in approach, with the memory flashbacks being far too abundant for my taste. While the narrative is compelling, it never grabbed me as much emotionally as it needed too, though one can certainly not deny its ambition or scale. The connection between Jack and the woman is a case of being told instead of shown, with myself never really feeling the connection they shared. In the end Joseph Kosinki's Oblivion is a gorgeous piece of science fiction filmmaking and even though it goes through too many of the familiar tropes of the genre, one cannot deny its visual power. 7/10
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
|