There Is A Message

Rating: 9/10 (21 November 2013)

There are over 700 user reviews and almost 500 critic reviews and I certainly did not read all of them, but I did read a bunch of them, and not one of the reviews describes what the movie is actually about. They get into the acting and the cinematography and the personal and professional lives of Tom Cruise, and a whole bunch of other stuff---not including what the movie is actually about.
Some of the critics even claim there is not much of a story. They are flat wrong and I am going to have to say why.
*** Serious Spoiler Alert ***
The point of the movie is that there was a war between Humanity and space aliens. In the beginning, we are told and we believe that, yes, Humanity won that war but at terrible cost.
As the movie develops, we start to sense a growing doubt. Did Humanity really win that war or did the aliens win it? The answer gets less and less clear as the movie develops.
My initial reaction to "Oblivion" was much like everybody else's: I thought it was a slick nothing. But, as I thought about the central theme of the movie---who really won the war?---and put it into our own modern context, I realized the brilliance of it.
Everybody seems to think that the West in general and the U.S. in particular won the Cold War. Many people, including scholars, have pronounced the death of socialism and the triumph of capitalism. Of course, that is just what I thought, as well. And yet, today we have a socialist president in the White House, we are getting socialized medicine, and my own city (New York) just elected a Sandinista-style Marxist as mayor.
At this point, it is fair to ask: Who really won the Cold War? Once I realized this, my sense of the movie changed completely. Yea, sure, there are flaws, no doubt, but the basic idea is brilliant and, on the whole, it is a brilliant movie.