Sunday, August 11, 2013

Oblivion


I don't want to get into a habit of not posting, because it's a slippery slope. I've been sick for a couple of days and since I couldn't get out of bed I decided to watch this movie. I still think Tom Cruise is pretty damn crazy after that whole Scientology jumping on Oprah's couch thing, but he's been in some very good movies. And the man does not age. He either has a really good plastic surgeon or maybe there's some truth to that Scientology craziness.
Anyway, in case you can't tell I tend to enjoy movies that are post apocalyptic or focus on the end of the world, so when I saw the preview for this one a while back I wanted to see it. And speaking of, one thing that disappointed me a little bit is that you don't get to see as many ruined cities and signs of civilization long gone as they made it look like. You do get to see the remains of the Statue of Liberty, the stadium where the last Superbowl was played, etc, but not much else.
Basically, all of humanity has fled Earth and lives either in a bigass space station called the TET, or in a space colony on Titan, one of Saturn's moons. Tom Cruise and his support/lover live in a control tower above the surface of Earth, and maintain drone workers that help protect these big machines that draw the salt water from the ocean to be used for power (they explain the process pretty well in the movie). There are also some bad guys who are remnants of an alien invasion that destroyed the world called Scavs that sabotage the process and destroy the drones from time to time.
Basically, this story is a pretty big mindfuck, as what you think is going on is nothing like what's actually going on. I'm not going to give it away. My other complaint is that in this two hour movie Morgan Freeman's character doesn't get a whole lot of screen time. I'm going to give this movie a solid rating of OK. Worth watching for some of the WTF moments that come out of left field and are totally unexpected, as well as some cool special effects and a great use of Procol Harum's "Whiter Shade of Pale."

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