Oblivion, directed by Joseph Kosinski from a screenplay based on his eponymous graphic novel, stars Tom Cruise as Jack Harper, a simple drone repairman in a post- apocalyptic earth. Oblivion’s prologue wastes no subtlety in telling us that aliens invaded the planet and effectively destroyed it. The planet is a mush of gray radioactive detritus, so the humans moved to Jupiter’s moon, while still harnessing energy from Earth through giant triangle machines that suck up the water from our oceans. But rebels who still live on earth, called scavengers, or ‘Scavs’ for short, often sabotage the machinery, and it’s Jack’s job to make sure everything stays on track. Pretty straightforward.
Truth is, Jack lives a pretty great life. He flies around on this nifty helicopter dragonfly (and boy is it cool); repairs drones with the help of Victoria (Andrea Riseborough), a gorgeous techie who serves as his base control (and girlfriend); and then returns at night to his ultra-modern sky tower- a modernist extravaganza like something out of Architectural Digest where Jack and Victoria live in safety and security. Life in the future, however, is not enough for Jack, whose nostalgia for Earth’s lost treasures is a cause for friction between Victoria and his higher up mission control named Sally (the scarily cheerful Melissa Leo, who can do no wrong). Victoria, who for some reason trots around the house in chic jumpers and high heels, is happy with the status quo and is brought to chilling, mechanical life by the daring Ms. Riseborough.
Jack, meanwhile, spends time in a little hut he’s built in Central Park, the only oasis of greenery on the entire planet. Other remnants of New York City show up- a submerged Empire State Building, the cracked hand of the Statue of Liberty, or more generally, giant submarines half protruding from the mud. The scenes are evocative and haunting; Jack stands in a destroyed stadium that I assume is the Meadowlands, where he voices over a Giants game with a Yankees cap on his nostalgic head. These expository scenes take up almost half of the movie before things get “action-filled,” and I was content to simply enjoy the post-apocalyptic scenery, which was innovative and quite beautiful. Production designer Daniel Simon, (a holdover from Kosinskis last effort, the stylish Tron:Legacy) , has just the right of touch of austerity and simplicity, and the cinematography, from Claudio Miranda, who just nabbed an Oscar for his work on Life of Pi, is quite the companion peice.
But no. Things get out of whack when Jack stumbles upon the cryogenically stored body of Julia (Olga Kurylenko), a girl who he has seen in recurring dreams, and also meets the shadowy head “Scav” Malcolm Beach (Morgan Freeman), a character so underwritten that not even Freeman’s bass solemnity can make him interesting. The rest of the plot is equally uninteresting, a dry science fiction canoodle that unabashedly rehashes The Matrix, Total Recall, and Independence Day without a genuine surprise in sight. Kosinski maintains that Oblivion is an homage to sci-fi flicks of the 1970s, but it comes off more as a rip-off, or at any rate, a tepid bore. It’s not so much that the characters aren’t genuine- though that’s true in this case and in many science fiction movies- it’s that the movie doesn’t provide the scaffolding for either genuine thrills or human drama. It’s a shame, because Oblivion had such potential, and at the hands of a better writer, the movie could have exploited so many avenues of suspense. I felt gratified watching Oblivion because of its high style, but it’s eerie lack of drama bothered me.
The movie Disconnect, also starring Andrea Riseborough along with a half dozen other up-and-coming actors, is a more substantive stab at filmmaking. Director Henri Alex Rubin, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker behind the 2005 documentary Murderball, tells a cautionary tale about the misuse of technology, utilizing three or four alluring narratives that intersect with each other. Much as Paul Haggis’s 2004 film Crash (remember that movie that upset Brokeback Mountain for the Best Picture win?), Disconnect shows the dizzying interplay of an ensemble cast through the use of natural dialogue, precise direction, and structural innovation.
First there’s Kyle (Max Thieriot), a young street urchin who sells sexual chats on the Internet. Kyle is contacted by Nina (Riseborough again), a TV journalist who Kyle calls a puma- not yet a cougar- and who wants to interview Kyle as part of a story on high school dropouts. Then there’s Cindy (Paula Patton) and Derek (Alexander Skarsgard) victims of a credit card fraud that followed from Cindy’s use of chat rooms to cope with the loss of her infant child. Finally, there’s the Boyd family (parents: Jason Bateman and Hope Davis; children: Jonah Bobo and Haley Ramm), who learn the evils of cyber-bullying when son Ben tries to kill himself after being victimized on Facebook by two boys pretending to be a female love interest. Various supporting characters are also introduced and re-introduced when they walk into each others lives, often to negative repercussions.
Technology is a trope of our time, and our generation, reared on smart phones and computers, may be blind to just how interesting personal interaction becomes when squeezed through the impersonal nature its of technology. Anyone who has e’er had a conversation :y text understands how different it is than actual face to face talking, such is the nature of technology. It’s not surprising then that, despite how intense the drama is, the movie comes off a cold, an effect that Rubin probably considers inherent to overuse of technology. The movie’s antiseptic blue-greens, from director of photography ken seng, emphasize the pedestrian drama of the characters, many of whom do things that the audience is ashamed of.
You can tell that the director feels passionately about his work from the emotion he invests in the engaging, albeit sometimes far-fetched, storylines. The ensemble cast is well chosen and Mr. Rubin directs them with exactitude. The movie’s message may seem a tad sensationalist to younger viewers, I simply understood it as an warning allegory, a distillation of technological harshness into its essence. At any rate, Mr. Rubin is not to be faulted for making a movie that is more realized than the reality; if anything he is to be commended, because, like Crash before it, Disconnect rings with painful elegance and deliberate intensity. Watching a father (Mr. Bateman) check his phone at the dinner table while his son silently craves validation will make wince from honesty and convince you that Disconnect is a worthwhile trip to the cinema.