Tending the Ruins

The first trailer for Oblivion arrived with an image that’s hard to shake: a desolate, half-submerged Earth that still looks, impossibly, beautiful. Tom Cruise as a solitary drone technician maintaining machines on a planet humanity has already evacuated—tending something whose purpose is finished—is a genuinely melancholic premise, and for a few minutes of footage it reads like science fiction that might actually be about something.

Joseph Kosinski made Tron: Legacy before this, which is both a recommendation and a caveat. The man has a precise understanding of visual atmosphere and almost no interest in the messier interior lives of characters. Oblivion has that same quality: immaculate production design, Claudio Miranda’s cinematography treating every frame as something worth pausing on, an M83 score doing the emotional work that the screenplay occasionally neglects. The story’s central twist—concerning what the lone caretaker is actually maintaining, and for whom—is both satisfying and slightly inevitable, which is the best you can usually say about blockbuster science fiction.

"Earth Is A Memory Worth Fighting For." As taglines go, it earns its grandiosity. The film manages, in patches, to genuinely be about that feeling. For a production of this scale, patches is enough.