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The “memory wipes” mentioned in Joseph Kosinski’s second feature s꧙hould be made mandatory for incoming viewers. Since cinemas don’t sell them, can’t quite deliver on its promise of a mystery-steeped, original sci-fi contrast to 2013’s franchise heavyweights💯 ( , et al).
Repeating both the visual wow and storytelling stutters of his , Kosinski’s riff on his own unpublished graphic novel dazzles but lacks vital parts: the pace or twists that might have made it easier for us to forget the genre classics it fairly brazenly echoes.
If at first that’s not a problem, you can thank Kosinski’s striking vision of a world ravaged by alien♎ war. Crumbling like a stale muffin, a shot-to-bits moon has reduced Earth to an eco-disaster zone scoured by alien “Scavengers”.
He also gets to play (almost to the point of redundancy) with a bubble-ship and a space-age dirt bike, groovy toy-tech made to match the slinky sky-tower he shares with co-worker Andrea Riseborough. Their sexy-time together briefly helps you forget you’re watching humanised, though the deadening dialogue could’ve benefited from WALL-E ’s wordless reserve.
The plot could’ve benefited from some spark, too: taking ages to get moving, it leaves you homing in on the echoes of other movies. , and are good echoes, true, but the low-powered scripting (by too-many-cooks trio William Monahan, Michael Arndt and Karl Gajdusek) fails to match their lean punch. Even when the crash-down, barf-up arrival of Olga Kurylenko’s mysterious Julia jolts the story awake, it slumps again into a sombre serving of “Previously in Oblivion ” exposition.
The pace perks up when, repressed memories stirred by Julia, Harper 🔜revisits Earth and uncovers complications involving Morgan Freeman’s posse of Batman cosplayers. (That’s what they look like, anyway.) Spoiler turf begins here, as Kosinski splices mysteries, airborne mayhem and𝕴 M83’s driving techno-Zimmer score with arthouse-meets-blockbuster intent.
What’s lacking here isn’t orchestration, but invention. The canyon dogfight echoes ; the𓆉 explosive but hollow, mudd𒅌led climax echoes minus the goofy thrills.
Intelligent, innovative and intimate sci-fi is always welcome, but Oblivion isn’t quite it. Maybe 2013’s other one-word genre originals – , Gravity – will give us more to remember them by.
Kevin Harley is a freelance journalist with bylines at Total Film, Radio Times, The List, and others, specializing in film and music coverage. He can most c♒ommonly be found writing movie reviews and previews at GamesRadar+.