Oblivion

A scene from the upcoming "Mission: Impossible 5"

Grade: B

Director: Joseph Kosinski

Starring: Tom Cruise, Morgan Freeman, Olga Kurylenko,  Andrea Riseborough, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Melissa Leo

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 6 min.

Amid the recognizable rubble still littering Earth’s dystopian hellscape in 2077, what also manages to survive humankind’s war against alien invaders are plenty of science-fiction movie cues to populate director Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion. While such homage is usually cause for fanboy freneticism, in this case it actually distracts from an otherwise sci-fi stemwinder.

Six decades prior, invading aliens called Scavengers (Scavs, for short) shattered the Moon, inflicting all manner of cataclysmic destruction. When humans were forced to use nukes to beat back the extraterrestrials, the planet was left a barren wasteland unable to sustain life. Humankind fled to the Saturn moon Titan, leaving behind a small band of techs tasked with maintenancing giant rigs extracting any remaining subterranean water, along with stamping out any Scavs still lurking about.

Tech 49 is Jack Harper (Tom Cruise), who together with his dutiful communications officer and lover Victoria (Andrea  Riseborough), form “an effective team” in service of their off-planet commander, Sally (Melissa Leo). Jack and Victoria live atop a Frank Lloyd Wright tower in the clouds, with Jack flying a pod-like aircraft below to complete his missions. They are aided by airborne “drones” controlled remotely by Sally, each powerfully weaponized and equipped with HAL’s dead red eye.

Between making his daily rounds and nocturnal skinny-dipping with Vicka, Jack explores the ruins of sports stadiums, pilfers books from the razed New York Public Library and constructs a getaway shack near an unspoiled oasis stocked with such artifacts a Yankees cap, sunglasses and a vinyl record collection (apparently CD players didn’t survive the radiation).

Jack also suffers recurring flashbacks of meeting a woman on the observation deck of the pre-war Empire State Building. Matters become more complicated when that woman, Julia (Olga Kurylenko), crash-lands to Earth in a derelict NASA spaceship with the rest of her hibernating crew. A drone destroys all but Julia, who Jack rescues and awakens.

What follows a slow revelation of Oblivion’s secrets, including the appearance of a battered band of refugees led by Beech (Morgan Freeman), who takes an interest in Jack after seeing him thumb through Horatius in Lord Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome.
Subtexts aside, Tom engages Cruise control, conveying his typical determined daredevil persona, for better and worst. But if you dig deep enough, there’s also a critique about the cookie-cutter action characters Cruise and others have portrayed throughout their acting careers.

While Riseborough proves worthy of her emotionally complex role, Kurylenko is woefully one-note. Freeman contributes little besides Morgan Freeman’s Voice™, but heck, do you really need anything else?

The stunning visuals and bombastic soundtrack (which sounds like a fusion of Daft Punk and Hans Zimmer) to Oblivion owe much to Kosinski’s first feature, Tron: Legacy. Indeed, the exquisite art design and special effects alone merit the full IMAX viewing (and ticket price). But, the influences hardly end there. The film borrows heavily from such 1970s sci-fi standards as 2001, Silent Running, The Omega Man, Planet of the Apes, Star Wars, and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris. There are also plentiful references to recent genre entries like The Matrix, Moon, and WALL-E. (TOM-E, perhaps?).

All this aping would normally expose Oblivion to being damned as derivative. But, the unique template produced by Kosinski and cinematographer Claudio Miranda—who won an Oscar for Life of Pi—helps save the film from cinematic, well, oblivion.

The Fighter

Queensbury rules, baby!

Grade: B –
Director: David O. Russell
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Melissa Leo, and Mickey O’Keefe
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hour, 54 minutes

Cut from the carrion of Raging Bull and Rocky, the only rational explaination for the existence of The Fighter is the Affleck-ian notion that any fable set in the blue-collar streets of a Boston burb deserves cinematic veneration.

The true story of boxer “Irish” Micky Ward and his trainer and half-brother, Dickie Ecklund, remains lore in their hometown of Lowell, Mass. But, the film adaptation of Ward’s fall-and-rise is pat and derivative, the story of a palooka who endures his drug-addled brother and meddlesome family to achieve the sort of greatness that director David O. Russell apparently believes is best shared with the audience via film-ending postscripts.

The film opens in 1993 with Dickie – an ex-pugilist turned reprobate and crack addict – acting as trainer to Micky, a former Golden Gloves champion who has seen his once-promising ranking erode to where he is now regarded as a “stepping stone” up-and-coming fighters use to catapult their own careers. Disserved by the chronically high and/or absent Dickie and his officious manager and mom, Alice (Melissa Leo), Micky looks to revive his dormant career after his brother is sent to prison and Micky embraces the charms of Charlene (Amy Adams), a rough-and-ready barmaid who possesses just enough book-learning to threaten Micky’s gaggle of femullet-sporting half-sisters.

The Fighter is the standard story of the down-and-out fighter looking for one last shot at glory. Unfortunately, the film does not possess sufficient narrative drive, whether inside or outside the ring. Moreover, Russell’s penchant for interjecting humor into his narrative – which worked to great effect in Three Kings and I Heart Huckabees – proves distracting here, fostering a tonal inconsistency that constantly uproots any stab at dramatic tension. As comic relief, Russell usually trots out Micky’s siblings to play their part in some garish Massachusetts minstrel show.

Adams and Bale – whose lone one-on-one scene late in the film is like a breath of fresh air – are the pros in this bunch, although Bale’s widely ballyhooed, sure-fire Oscar-nominated turn often feels like a masterwork of mimicry. The true standout, however, is Leo, whose performance conjures a less sadistic, more boisterous version of Jacki Weaver’s matriarch in Animal Kingdom.

Still, as The Fighter marches steadily to its inevitably feel-good finale, the film’s biggest enigma is not only scrubbing Dickie’s recent relapse into drugs and crime, but also its virtual omission of Micky’s epic fights against Emanuel Burton and Arturo Gatti – three of his four total bouts against them were named Ring Magazine’s Fight of the Year. It’s akin to making Raging Bull without mentioning Jake La Motta’s bouts with Sugar Ray Robinson.

It took Wahlberg – who also coproduces – four years to bring this film to fruition. Unfortunately, the round-robin of directors, screenwriters, and actors linked to the project exacted a narrative toll. Consequently, this Fighter is a scrappy underdog that remains stuck on the undercard.

Neil Morris