What does a woman want?

Rating: 8/10 (14 April 2013)

I think I would be a great director. An exercise I love to engage in after seeing movies like Oblivion is to imagine the sequel, only this time told from the point of view of everyday life. I think that Oblivion 2 could be a hit. The central conflict of the film would be that Jack Harper 2 is still beating himself up over the fact that he lost the fight to Jack Harper 1...Jack Harper 1 dug deep and found his human soul, whereas Jack Harper 2 just watched the Tet blow up from Earth like a shmo. How humiliating...Jack got his butt kicked by himself. In the three years it took JH2 to find Olga Kurylenko, he's turned bitter and in fact misses flying his mosquito and skinny dipping in the sweet pool in the clouds with Vika...screw subsistence living, eating berries, and hanging with a bunch of grungy resistance fighters. As for Olga, she misses the "real" Jack...never stops reminding Jack 2 he's not up to the standard of Jack 1...disgusted with his cowardice, she begins cheating on Jack 2 with the hunky Sykes character. Sykes turns out to be an absolute dog and after she catches him sleeping with every other woman from the underground tribe she loses it completely and runs away from the idyllic cabin in the hopes of finding a better Jack Harper. The little girl finds a turtle in the pond and adopts it as her pet...a cute detail. Etc. This is how they would film such a movie in France...of course, the price of this emotional verisimilitude would be the epic scope and philosophical tone that make these movies an American specialty.
As for Oblivion 1...I liked it. I go for these epic, super sincere science fiction stories. This one is similar to all of the other ones...there aren't that many twist possibilities out there and there's no shame in adding one more variation to the basic theme. Apocalypse...cloning...the official truth versus the real truth...redemption through love...sure, we've seen it before, but we've seen everything before. These science fiction movies are a conversation that we as a society are having with ourselves...playing out in the collective unconscious all of our fantasies about the present of humanity. Of course they're going to resemble each other...they have to if they want to say anything about our world. One important theme here is feminine desire. What does a woman want? The question that famously stumped Freud is front and center here. A million Jack Harpers and only one Julia...the idea is intriguing. And couldn't the whole premise be considered Vika's fantasy? Is not the Tet a big V? Vika is attractive in a prosaic English way...whereas Olga is a Continental fox and femme fatale who completely blows her modest domestic charms out of the water. And who is the culprit? Vika's overweight, insecure mother, of course, whose only advice to the young Vika was something like: the way to seduce a man is by making a good shepherd's pie. Have you ever been to England? It's not a very sexy place...here in France I regularly see bands of chubby young English girls on vacation who clearly look shell shocked by how much sexier and more comfortable with Eros their French counterparts are. This brings us to Sally: who is Sally if not the castrating mother figure whose meddling prevents Vika from becoming the kind of independent, sexy woman that Julia is? Vika's inability to sever the tie with Mother turns out to be the source of the raging force that destroys Earth...beware of a woman's desire...