Fascinating, visual delight

Rating: 7/10 (2 May 2013)

A man on a workaday mission in a post-apocalyptic Earth discovers secrets about his home planet - and himself. He comes to realize he's just a simple pawn, that he's been set up. He is, at times, on the run from those who had employed him. If you guessed that maybe this was a Tom Cruise movie, you'd be right. Poor old Tom is always getting set up and having to figure out what's what. But, like his earlier Minority Report, Cruise's latest sci-fi is a lot of fun, beautifully shot and tightly plotted.
It's the future, sometime, I forget when. Giant bugs invaded Earth. We kicked their butts with nukes, thus rendering almost the entire planet unlivable. Those who survived the war were shuttled off to eventually settle on Jupiter's moon Titan. Meanwhile, drones are set up in low Earth orbit to monitor and destroy any surviving bad guys, known as Scavs. You know, short for scavengers. Nothing grows. It's a big ol' wasteland, this planet.
Jack Harper (Cruise) is a soldier who has the task of being the clean-up crew; he and his colleague Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) are in charge of monitoring the drones and the extraction machines that are removing water from Earth's surface to bring it to a huge space station called the Tet, humanity's escape vessel. All Jack has to do each day is check on the drones, fly around in a funny looking ship, and blast away the occasional Scav while ensuring that the rigs gulping down the water are still operational.
The Earth at this point is divided into at least two zones: inhabitable (kind of) and radioactive. The rigs are working in the former area, trying to squeeze all they can out of the planet before Jack and Victoria have to head up to the Tet - in two weeks' time.
But something funny is going on, down there on Earth. A simple recon mission to check out a rig leads Jack to believe he's not alone down there, and the truth - well, the first truth is shocking enough to him (he's been there a long time, though he has almost no memory of a time before the War), and the second is a stunner to the nth degree.
Certainly, to give more information would spoil the film for you. I was pleasantly surprised to find a Tom Cruise movie in which there was a surprise of some sort. And his acting was better than usual, too - he's human, not a cardboard monkey playing dress up. When confronted with the truth, he's as befuddled as we are, which is unusual for a Tom Cruise character; they typically Know It All and Save the Day. Not so sure that's the case here.
His Jack also shows quite a bit of depth. We get glimpses of his past, through his own fractured memories. He can't shake them. He dreams about things that seem familiar and yet unknowable. He is introspective and cocky. He is daring, yet unsure. He is human.
Morgan Freeman shows up in a role that cannot be explicated here except to say that he's Morgan Freeman. Melissa Leo is Sally, the commander of the Tet who checks in with Jack and Victoria every day to see how those rigs are a-comin' along (Southern accent). Both are excellent as always.
I came away from Oblivion with a strong sense of satisfaction. The ending feels right; it's not contrived, it's not forced, it's not really Hollywood. That's not to say this isn't a feel-good movie, because in many ways it is. Just not the way you'd expect from the beginning of the film.