There is More than One of Everything

Rating: 10/10 (4 August 2013)

Tom Cruise just seems to be getting younger, as long as he does not grow a beard. Whether he is Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible or here as Tech Jack Harper, he never seems to age, and his energy is great. I don't care if he's tapping the energy of some Mothership, he's still OK by me.
Speaking of Mothership, there is one in this film that is a real Mother, if we remove the word "Ship" from the end and add in something more derogatory.
As we get into this film, Jack recites a "Revisionist Future History" of sorts. There had been an invasion. The moon has been blown to bits, and all the "hoomans" moved away after the "war" and are living on Saturn's moon Titan. There are huge water Sucking machines gobbling up all the earths oceans drop by precious drop, supposedly to send it all to Titan. And it's Jack's job as "Tech" to keep these things running, along with a bunch of Robotic Drones that kill off apparent left-over "invaders" that are still hanging around Earth for some unknowable reason.
Jack's assigned wife is "Victoria" (Andrea Riseborough) and she's his Comm officer. They report to "Sally" (Melissa Leo) who is allegedly on Titan supervising them. It's a "Mop Up Operation" as Jack puts it, they have two weeks to go, then they can all go home to "Titan" and live happily ever after.
But Jack keeps seeing the image of a woman (Olga Kurylenko) and it bothers him. He doesn't even know who she is. But lately Jack has been picking up Books and other pieces of remaining culture and he hides them away at some house by a lake, which appears to be an oasis in a land basically barren. It's off the Grid, so Victoria has never seen it - Victoria stays high up in some Sky Nest monitoring the Comms while Jack roams the earth fixing broken Drones. He keeps asking Victoria if she won't go down to the surface with him, but she always refuses.
The Robotic Drones are there to kill off the "Invaders", Jack can't comprehend why they are still there and why they are so tenacious. There is nothing left, isn't there? We get flashes of their POV now and then along with images of what look like Scurrying Animals. When Jack falls into a pit which is the Public Library in NY City, they don't shoot him. Why?
In fact there are two histories running at once, the revisionist history which we are led to believe, and what really happened, which comes to Jack in dreams and visions. Which one is real? And who is this Woman?
But all things start getting answered, when an Orbiting Spaceship falls to the earth after 60 years, and who is in it but the Woman which Jack dreams about. As a matter of fact, Jack's world is twisted totally out of proportion from this moment on.
What I love about this film is the imagery, it's a totally believable surrealistic landscape of a world devastated. Combinations of CGI and Practical Filming leave no indications where one ends and the other begins. What we have here is an antiseptic High-Tech World above the sky and the remnants of the devastation below. Of particular visual interest is an image of the very top of the Empire State Building sticking out of a sea of sand, for some reason, a signal is sent from this ruin to some place in the sky.
But "Nothing is as it Seems" and "There Is More than One of Everything". These two Axioms form the basis of what is a wholly unpredictable and enjoyable movie. Keep your eyes peeled for Morgan Freeman and the Stuntwoman-Goddess Zoe Bell, because "Humans show up when they are least expected".
Directed by Newcomer Joseph Kosinski who wrote the original Graphic Novel this was based on, we can be safely assured there are no "Temporal Causality Loops" or other gimmicks used by filmmakers. This is wholly original ground, even though it is basically Tom Cruise running around with a Gun- but I have always enjoyed Tom Cruise running around with a gun.
The Film's Score co-written by Anthony Gonzalez and Joseph Trapanese (The Bourne Legacy) is Bookended with a wonderful song performed by M. 8. 3. - So it's new faces all around.