Oblivion - Part 1

[dustbros]

Can't wait for your take on 'Lion for Lamb's success.

cause lions for lambs was a cruise vehicle big budget feature?
i know you belive tc is a gay but come on hes one of biggest star thesedays.
face the fact, not rumors.

 

[BH/HHH]

Talking about this recently made me want to leave my thoughts on it, this was for me the best non Superhero film in 2013 and my second best film of 2013. It was so good from start to finish and its one of Tom Cruise's best performances. Its probably one of my all time favourite films, the standout visual was seeing the destroyed moon.

 

[DA_Champion]

Talking about this recently made me want to leave my thoughts on it, this was for me the best non Superhero film in 2013 and my second best film of 2013. It was so good from start to finish and its one of Tom Cruise's best performances. Its probably one of my all time favourite films, the standout visual was seeing the destroyed moon.

I share your genersl assessment.

This movie was brilliant and beautiful.

 

[BH/HHH]

I actually lived the earlier parts of the film the best where he's out there on his own only talking to Vik on the comm. i just wish the trailers hadn't ruined that the scavs were humans.

 

[Lord]

-A futuristic Worker Bee with a specific job to do? Moon/ The Handmaid's Tale
-Clone Farm of Manufactured humans? The Matrix and many others
-Clone who doesn't know he's a clone? Blade Runner
-Hero is faced with reality and how his life was a lie? The Matrix and many others
-A real or imagines oásis to remind the hero of his past life? Solaris
-Crowd manipulation? The Matrix, They live, and so many others.

Sure, very original film, brilliant stuff. Most of the time, when a blockbuster film tries to be deep and complex, it fails terribly, with a very shallow result.

 

[BH/HHH]

Everything is inspired by something else that came before it, theres not an exception there is always something subconscious or not that leads to creative decisions. I find the argument that things aren't original rather stupid because something always inspires something else. If its not directly ripping something off then
I don't see a problem at all.

 

[Lord]

That is true, but i don't feel like the result in Oblivion was good enough to make it stand on its oun. Same feeling i got from the Eragon books.

 

[BH/HHH]

That is true, but i don't feel like the result in Oblivion was good enough to make it stand on its oun. Same feeling i got from the Eragon books.

Fair enough, Oblivion didn't feel like anything rehashed to me, thought it was very fresh.

 

[Ipodman]

I love that it's paying homage to previous sci-fi movies... and it's very heart felt. From Tron Legacy, you can tell this guy loves his sci-fi. it's like Pacific Rim I guess

 

[Lord]

One thing i grant the guy is that he knows how to give some gorgeous visuals.

 

[BH/HHH]

I love that it's paying homage to previous sci-fi movies... and it's very heart felt. From Tron Legacy, you can tell this guy loves his sci-fi. it's like Pacific Rim I guess

Oh is it the same director? I actually preferred Legacy to the original Tron. Although I do appreciate that the original Tron was alot harder to do.

 

[Ipodman]

Yeah he did Tron Legacy, then Oblivion... and Oblivion is way better because it actually had a message (imo) on top of all the pew pew pew action

 

[BH/HHH]

Yeah he did Tron Legacy, then Oblivion... and Oblivion is way better because it actually had a message (imo) on top of all the pew pew pew action

Ha ha love that pew pew pew action

 

[Kane52630]

I still watch this movie from time to time on my big screen tv. It's one of those films I would just keep playing in the background when i'm busy working on something else.

 

[jacobed]

I thought this cg was better than Gravity's. This I was astounded time and time again by how real everything looked. Gravity didn't look as real to me

 

[DA_Champion]

There's plenty that's original about this movie. People harp on the fact that it lifts from previous material, but virtually all science fiction movies do this. What oblivion does is it adds to those materials as well.

What is the movie about? It's a diligently-constructed allegory for drone warfare. So by necessity it's probably original since there's been very little of that at all. How many other recent blockbusters tackle drone warfare and its broader sociology? Not many, though maybe such movies have been made in Europe and Asia and I don't know about them.

Some pieces:

- When have we seen the moon blown up before? That can be a reference to how catastrophic events are often seen at the start of wars, such as the collapse of the WTC on 9/11, which preceded the Afghanistan and Iraq wars that the movie comments on;
- Cruise and Riesborough stating "we are an effective team" is them buying into the propaganda. It's a reference to human microphone, the way partisans mindlessly chant political slogans at rallies;
- The promise if Titan in the movie is the promise of glory / happy retirement that is often used to entice soldiers, though is often meaningless. It's communicated more effectively in this movie since as viewers, the first time we hear about people living happily on Titan, we're supposed to think "Titan? WTF? There's no way anybody is living there ! what's going on?" and thus this communicates the hollowness of the promise of future glory. Even as Jack and Julia totally believe in the promise of Titan, we know something is wrong, the same way in fact an external observer could do the same to US troops in Iraq/Afghanistan/etc enamoured of the promise of a perpetual happy retirement.
- The extraction of water from the Earth is the extraction of oil from the middle east and elsewhere. It is done with giant, well-defended machines. Jack and Julia are the ones operating those machines, but they will get no benefit from their work.
- Jack and Julia conduct their business comfortably, from the clouds, equivalent to air force pilots, and by extension, drones.
- The men are on the ground, Jack and Julia are in the skies as a labour aristocracy, and the Tet is in space, at even higher ground.
- When we finally meet the Tet at the end, based on past science fiction (e.g. Independence Day) we might expect a civilisation of aliens. We don't find that. We don't find a single alien at all. It's just a computer, a set of programming commands, similarly to how modern capitalism can be argued to be just an ideology that operates and exists independently of the hearts and minds of men ruled by its laws. This also communicates that Earth is being destroyed for essentially nothing. The lack of an alien presence when one is expected is creepy.

And that's after not having seen the movie in six months.

 

[BH/HHH]

Nice post Sir

The refreshing thing about the Tet for me was in these sci-fi films they are often let down by their twist endings/villain reveals but not Oblivion. The Tet was an interesting concept as you say, loved that reveal.

You're preaching to the choir here when you mention the destroyed Moon. Thought it looked amazing, took my breath away when I first saw it.

 

[DA_Champion]

Nice post Sir

The refreshing thing about the Tet for me was in these sci-fi films they are often let down by their twist endings/villain reveals but not Oblivion. The Tet was an interesting concept as you say, loved that reveal.

You're preaching to the choir here when you mention the destroyed Moon. Thought it looked amazing, took my breath away when I first saw it.

Yeah the destroyed moon was very original. We've seen a lot of stuff in the past twenty years and it's very hard to come up with something original. Kosinki (or one of the writers) did so here. As a show of force, the Tet blew up the moon. It also serves as a good story point since it's an effective metaphor to 9/11 / Pearl Harbour etc.

The physics was also thought through. The moon didn't just disappear. They still had a remnant moon, and the debris disk lied in the orbital plane of the moon. It's more realistic that way.

Most directors would have shown you a laser beam hitting the moon and making a boom, and that wouldn't be so original because we've seen it already. What Kosinski showed was the aftermath.

 

[gohei_]

Nice post Sir

The refreshing thing about the Tet for me was in these sci-fi films they are often let down by their twist endings/villain reveals but not Oblivion. The Tet was an interesting concept as you say, loved that reveal.

You're preaching to the choir here when you mention the destroyed Moon. Thought it looked amazing, took my breath away when I first saw it.

Proably my favorite moment in the movie.

 

[DA_Champion]

Andrea Riesborough's red hair contrasted so magnificently with the movie's white/grey/blue colour scheme.

 

[Lord]

Are you guys serious? Blowing up the moon is not an original idea, it has been done in fiction for years and years, hell, Dragon Ball even did so some 2 or 3 times.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DetonationMoon

 

[DA_Champion]

Are you guys serious? Blowing up the moon is not an original idea, it has been done in fiction for years and years, hell, Dragon Ball even did so some 2 or 3 times.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DetonationMoon

Are you serious?

I never watched Dragon Ball, and I doubt Kosinski watched it either, he's in his late 30s so he's about 20 years old too old to be aware of the plots of Dragon Ball.

All of those examples are quite different as well in their implementation and their impact on the plot and in their follow-up, at least the ones I read. For example:

Piccolo destroying the moon to stop Gohan from rampaging as a giant ape (the moon is the giant ape form's power source).

That's not at all what we saw in Oblivion.

 

[Lord]

Then you should try reading the ones in movies and not just the ones in Dragon Ball just because i mentioned that even Dragon Ball did it

The implementation in the story, right, but what you said was

Yeah the destroyed moon was very original. We've seen a lot of stuff in the past twenty years and it's very hard to come up with something original.

And i was answering to that As for how it's put in the film, in most post-apocalyptic worlds that were plagued by war, there's allways a destroyed element familiar to us to show that something major happened, from a half destroyed statue of Liberty to a sinking Manhattan, that way of storytelling is not original at all like you're implying.

 

[DA_Champion]

Then you should try reading the ones in movies and not just the ones in Dragon Ball just because i mentioned that even Dragon Ball did it

- The Moon inexplicably combusts in Amazon Women on the Moon, with a small piece continuing to dangle from a wire, after the first astronauts to visit it incur the wrath of the Amazons living there.
- Flash Gordon (1980), Ming pokes the moon out of orbit so it is sent on a collision course with Earth.
- Man of Steel: In one of the scenery shots of Krypton, you can see its moon partially blown up.
This is a Continuity Nod to the Silver Age comics' justification for Krypton having forbidden rocketry. Krypton's principal moon, Wegthor, had their first space colony — until scientist Jax-Ur's nuclear missile missed the meteor he was aiming at.
- In Star Trek: Into Darkness, one of the moons of the Klingon homeworld (Praxis) has apparently blown up; interestingly, in this timeline this seems to have happened 30 years before the event in the Prime universe, where it was a major plot point in Star Trek VI and was the event that paved the way for the end of formal hostilities between the Federation and the Klingon Empire in the TNG-era.
One could infer this was due to the Klingon's having studied the Narada from the previous film during the 25 years they held Nero and his crew prisoner. Presumably, by studying the technology of the mining ship, the Klingons inadvertently accelerated the accident that lead to the destruction of the moon in the Prime-verse, which was caused by over-mining.
- This happens in the not-too-distant future in the 2002 film of The Time Machine, when some genius decided that using nuclear weapons to dig caverns beneath the surface was a good idea. It causes a bit of an armageddon. The moon's still there despite their effort, but only about half or so is intact, the rest having settled into orbit or hit the Earth.

All very different, exempt possibly the one about the amazon women which I'm not familiar with. But it sounds different

And i was answering to that As for how it's put in the film, in most post-apocalyptic worlds that were plagued by war, there's allways a destroyed element familiar to us to show that something major happened, from a half destroyed statue of Liberty to a sinking Manhattan, that way of storytelling is not original at all like you're implying.

If we apply your standards then nothing is original. It's not a very interesting game to play at all:

"Gravity isn't very original, it's about people in space";
"The Wire isn't original, we've seen crime and corruption in other shows before";

etc.

 

[Senator Pleasury]

Are you serious?

I never watched Dragon Ball, and I doubt Kosinski watched it either, he's in his late 30s so he's about 20 years old too old to be aware of the plots of Dragon Ball.

All of those examples are quite different as well in their implementation and their impact on the plot and in their follow-up, at least the ones I read. For example:


That's not at all what we saw in Oblivion.

I'm way over 30 and I am aware of Dragon Ball Z.

People who make movies are always aware. They see everything as everything might be a reference or an inspiration.