Merrily Dancing Ape

I just saw the movie Oblivion. The critics didn’t love it. It only received a 53% rating from Rotten Tomatoes. But the critics are big dumb poopy heads and they’re flat out wrong.

This movie is as visually stunning as promised. The special effects are incredible. The drones look 100% real, and their integration with the live action is seamless. The acting is outstanding. Say what you will about Tom Cruise, the guy knows how to give a nuanced and truthful performance. He’s riveting. And the directing and writing are good, too. The story is compelling, and the story-telling is done right. Tight, efficient script. No clunky exposition, but by the end you fully understand everything you need to know about the backstory. The action stems organically from the characters pursuing their goals rather than being tacked on artificially.

The only major criticism of Oblivion with any validity is that the story is derivative. If you haven’t seen it yet, skip the rest of this paragraph because it contains spoilers. One of the best sci-fi movies of all time is Moon. The plot of Oblivion ends up being pretty similar. It’s Moon but in a bleak post-apocalyptic setting, with aliens that harvest the Earth’s oceans like in the television series “V”. There have been so many sci-fi movies with post-apocalyptic settings. They’re starting to get a little boring. Why is so much sci-fi so dark? How about a sci-fi movie that’s a little bit bright and happy? How about a vision of Earth that doesn’t involve aliens murderizing everybody?

One minor quibble with Oblivion is that the movie predicts that by the year 2017 we’ll have manned space flights to Titan with suspended animation chambers for the astronauts. Um, no.

I do have one other minor quibble with Oblivion, or not really Oblivion per se, but with alien invasion stories in general:

It makes NO SENSE WHATSOEVER that aliens would come all the way to Earth just to steal our natural resources. Why would aliens expend so much energy wiping out humankind, all just to get at our oceans? Water is easy to find elsewhere. Even within our solar system the aliens could probably extract water from the planets Mars, Neptune, or Uranus; the dwarf planet Ceres; the moons Europa or Enceladus; or any number of icy comets. And couldn’t the aliens just make their own water? Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the Milky Way Galaxy, and oxygen is the third must abundant. Burn them together and you get energy to power your spaceship plus plenty of liquid water.

There is nothing on Earth that doesn’t appear in greater abundance elsewhere in the galaxy, with the notable exception of life. If aliens ever visit Earth, they won’t see the life forms here as the obstacle; they will see them as the objective.

And it doesn’t make sense that aliens would come here to enslave or eat us, either. While evil aliens make for fun sci-fi, they’re unrealistic. Here’s why.

Space faring aliens have to be more than just intelligent. In order to develop advanced technology, they also must be highly cooperative. To cooperate on the scale necessary to produce rockets, they have to be social animals. I contend that any species inclined to cooperate on such a scale would not be interested in visiting other aliens for the purpose of killing them or taking their stuff. That just doesn’t add up.

Anyway, the Rare Earth hypothesis is most likely the correct answer to the Fermi paradox. In other words, the reason we haven’t met any aliens yet is because technologically advanced intelligent life is so rare and spread so far apart in the universe that meeting each other face-to-face is virtually impossible.

I’ll keep this brief. I’m not interested in writing a full review of the movie to discuss all the ways it was good, although it was a good movie (with a good cast, good script, decent special effects, etc). I just want to say one thing:

Jennifer Lawrence in this movie is amazing. Her acting, from start to finish, is about a thousand times better than the acting you normally see in action movies, even very good ones. I mean, she stunned me. I left the theater dumbfounded, mumbling about how actors in action movies never win awards for acting, but she should receive an academy award for that performance.

I often find action movies to be excruciatingly boring. There is certainly an artistry to action sequences, but most action movies devolve into clever action sequences mounted atop other clever action sequences, and as clever or artistic as they may be, without compelling characters in the midst of compelling interpersonal dramas, I stop caring about the action pretty quickly.

So this was refreshing. She made imaginary circumstances come alive, and that was a pleasure to watch.

(Her acting may just rescue the upcoming movies in the franchise, which are based on the horrible third book in the otherwise outstanding Hunger Games trilogy. The third is one of the most dismal books I’ve ever read. The plot is fine but the tone is way too dark – so dark it drains all satisfaction out of what is actually a happy ending. Even as a fan of the books, I won’t mind if the film makers change things a bit to make the tone brighter.)