Sunday Review: Oblivion

Echoes of past and future

By Jonathan Price

Utopia is the name of a famous 16th century vision by Sir Thomas More that has given its name to visions of a different world. In More it is ironic, meaning literally “nowhere”; and it is a place where a seeming ideal state has hidden flaws, such as never fighting war itself, but encouraging war in its allies and subordinates. Samuel Butler echoed this thinking in his Erewhon, which is almost Nowhere spelled backwards.
    If we consult our databank of images carefully we’ll discover it’s full of dystopian futures. It’s hard to imagine a future constructed out of ideas that isn’t dystopian in some way—because the future turns into a fascist state, or because it deteriorates, or because—given its origin—it is the product of a single mind, whether it is Hitler’s or Bill Gates’s or Ayn Rand’s. So many science fiction films incorporate some dystopia at their core because they begin in a vision of the future or a distant world that seems to embody the future. As someone once said, only God creates out of nothing, and so even the future is recognizable as a remolding of the present and often our fears in the present. Judging from such films, we fear or anticipate nuclear holocaust, ecological disaster, and the technological eradication of identity—among other disasters. And so at least one purpose of such utopian/dystopian efforts is to confront some of our secret fears.

And so Oblivion, the new film with Tom Cruise (directed by Joseph Kosinski), has its attractive/repelling vision of the future. Futurist as it is, like all utopias it is a clone of the present and the past, especially past films. The visual landscape is stunning with its clean, ultramodernist architectural and technological lines, and its vast spaces echoing remnants of the world we recognize. Embedded in its visuals and its plot are echoes of many films we have already seen over the years, with its decayed and half-buried icons, such as those we see near the end of Planet of the Apes (1968)—of the Empire State Building and perhaps the Golden Gate Bridge. Of course, Charlton Heston was the star of that film, and intriguingly figured prominently in two other dystopian films of the time that shed some light on Oblivion: Soylent Green (1973) and Omega Man (1971).
    In Soylent Green the overpopulated world was exhausting useable foodstuffs and the painful secret was that the authorities were killing and reprocessing humans who volunteered due to depression or starvation for euthanasia. These volunteers were reprocessed into a soy slurpy (soylent green) to feed the remaining population. Omega Man re-echoes these apocalyptic themes with Heston as one of the few last men on Earth populated essentially by a form of zombies. The biggest problem in these futurist thrillers is, who is the enemy? or how can they be defeated? In Oblivion the enemy is the “them” that surreptitiously kills humans and lies about the food source and assassinates or disappears those who get too close to the truth. This is not so different from the ominous Tet spaceship hanging in the day sky. The Tet guides things on the nuclear-devastated Earth, which Jack Harper, Technician #49 (Cruise), living with his female companion Vicka (Victoria, played by Andrea Riseborough), patrols for signs of scav (alien) activity. In Soylent Green most women are concubines referred to derogatorily or dismissively as “furniture,” and Tom’s companion is a higher-end version of the same. Vicka—dressed elegantly and seductively in a series of neutrally toned skirts and moving about the space-station office in unsensible high heels—offers a communication link, sustenance, sex, and support—except when she disrobes smoothly at night to take a dip in the suspended pool and ease Jack’s tensions in another way.
    This film is also a clone of Moon (2009), in which Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) has a repetitive function as a singular worker on a distant moon. He’s only in media contact with “Earth,” and in gradually discovering he is a clone he realizes that his “family,”—the family he converses with over the airwaves—have been dead for years and were not actually his. This is essentially the self-revelation of Technician 49 when he ventures into the “radiation” zone only to discover another identical version of himself performing a similar task. Like Sam, Jack’s memory has been imprinted with scenes from an actual human self and with images of home that represent ceased realities. Jack’s dilemma is solved, though, because his remembered wife Julia (Olga Kurylenko) is actually in suspended animation in a crashed spaceship he locates.

Oblivion offers a stunning world of technology and design: overlaid grids, electronic words, and machines we have not seen before that exist only in digital simulation: planes with multi-bendable wings, attack drones that look like floating pods with fuel cells and multiple machine guns, space stations from Disneyland’s Tomorrowland designs of years ago. Jack’s long-lost girlfriend and wife is mortally wounded but quickly treated and cured with a first-aid spray that stanches and bleeding and heals the wound. And the marvelous Tet itself is reminiscent of so many science fiction space stations, a miniature city cum Pentagon housed in a dramatic geometric shape, vast, alien, and ultimately indifferent. What’s amazing, actually, is that there is apparently no one there except the multiple clones of Jack and Vicka preserved in amniotic fluid ready for reissue to needed posts on Earth. The obnoxious and omnipresent Sally (Melissa Leo), who issues directives on video from the Tet, is nowhere to be seen or found on arrival and may simply be a harrowing cinema version of the iPhone’s Siri. She may be Jack and Vicka’s God but he has come to destroy her and the Tet. However, she may exist only as a digital loop.

By Andrew Wyeth, 1948

    The echoes of the past are in Jack’s memories (not really his own; he is a replicant) of his proposal to Julia, his avatar’s wife, in a scene stolen from A Night to Remember (1958), where he takes her to the top of the Empire State Building, a part of which remains standing in the current fallen Earthworld. Echoes of earlier humanity and of loss are seen in Jack’s treasuring of a passage from Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, in the painting Christina’s World, and in the playing of Procol Harem’s A Whiter Shade of Pale. Only nostalgia can solve the dilemma of the dystopic future and the robotic self.
    At the core of this film is a flimsy plot so common to dystopian movies: when we finally learn what is really going on, it doesn’t quite make sense. Jack learns the “scavs” he targets are the only humans left, and that there is no distant colony on a moon of Jupiter, and so he changes allegiance. He and Beech, the scav leader (Morgan Freeman), accept a suicidal mission to destroy the Tet with a miniaturized nuclear device disguised as a drone. The last scene is of Happy Valley on Earth, appropriated from yet another film, with Julia raising—we guess—Jack’s offsprings and being joined by joyous scavs.
    We still wonder whether the surviving humans have any culture worth preserving or whether they are superior, visually, to the stunning technology that seemed so pure and heartless.
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Copyright © 2013 by Jonathan Price

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