I mean, Jesus, it’s not one of those stand up poster displays you see at your local cineplex, it’s a freaking book cover.

[Source teaser-trailer.com]

[Obligatory Spoiler Warning]

I Introduction

Earlier this morning, I was trying to explain Oblivion, a relatively new science fiction movie featuring Tom Cruise, to my wife. Evidently it was taking too long.

“Just tell me the tagline.”

“What do you mean?”

“What does it say on the poster?”

“To forget everything,” I said in my movie-trailer voiceover guy voice, “he would have to remember nothing.”

“Is that what it really says?”

“No.”

II The State of Criticism

Opening mid-April, Oblivion featured a pretty aggressive marketing campaign, and has since garnered mostly mediocre reviews. Io9 recently ran a twenty-minute featurette[1] that detailed how a lot of the special effects were done, and how the production design came together. I sense that some marketing executive thought that Oblivion would sell better on these features, rather than its story.

Tom Cruise, the only actor with above-the-line billing, is not an especially likable man; his devotion to a controversial religion, the bizarre marriage to and divorce from Kat[i]e Holmes, his scenery chewing visits to Today  and Oprah (both relatively big news when War of the Worlds opened, in 2005) have all turned him into a bit of a laughingstock. He’s had particular trouble recovering from those two barking-mad TV appearances. The cult of celebrity being what it is, being seen as a fool, and what’s worse an unrepentant and arrogant one, will go a long way toward making many show up simply to watch you fail.

Much of the criticism I’ve read about the film seems to have latched onto those two aspects: that the film is pretty, but also relatively empty; and Schadenfreude at watching a successful actor who many in the industry love to hate doing something unsuccessful.[2] Manohla Dargis, for instance opens her review in the New York Times, by lamenting, “If only it were easy to laugh at Oblivion.” She goes on to describe the title as “invit[ing] mockery of [Cruise] and [the movie] both.”[3] She then takes a moment to compare the VTOL craft that Cruise’s character uses for traveling around to the obviously phallic vehicle driven by the two superheroes in Robert Smigel’s cartoon, “The Ambiguously Gay Duo.”[4] Homophobic attacks on Cruise’s (alleged) sexual orientation, in spite of his own unfortunate comments, hardly seem appropriate in the pages of the New York Times. Worse perhaps is David Edelstein, writing for Vulture, who concludes his review of the film by tossing in a low blow, swaddled in a bit of faint praise, “Cruise was on a roll for a while with Magnolia[5] and his two Spielberg pictures [Minority Report (2002), War of the Worlds (2005)]” he writes, “But he must be shedding brain cells like wives.”[6] Most of Edelstein’s review, even before he resorts to the ad hominem fallacy, demonstrates that he was scarcely paying attention during the screening.

It is true that the film is as deeply flawed as the man starring in it (though it’s hard to question Cruise’s work ethic). Only the first thing matters, and, even then, whatever problems the story has (and they are significant), we have only begun to scratch the surface of what the film has to tell us.

III The Story

As I was trying to explain to my wife, it is very difficult to provide a brief summary of Oblivion. The story is this: a few short years from today, the earth will be attacked by a mysterious alien enemy. They will destroy a large portion of the moon, causing “tsunamis and earthquakes”;[7] after the global destruction, they will invade, only to be defeated when humanity resorts to using our nuclear weapons. Get your affairs in order, folks.

The film opens with some startling images of the destroyed earth, the Empire State Building, buried in mud up to its observation deck, a massive crater at the center of what was once the Pentagon, a football stadium that looks more like a caldera from a dormant volcano. The camera skims, at Google satellite altitude, over submerged cities, and the wreckage of our once great civilization. The earth is all but uninhabitable; all that remains are a solitary man and woman, Adam and Eve in the wasteland, who watch over a stable of drones that are programmed to protect a series of towers that are, we are told, “converting the oceans into fusion energy”[8] to guarantee the survival of the colony founded by human survivors on Titan. Why do the towers need protecting? Well, the aliens have been defeated, but the war has left them stranded on earth, whose frozen, dusty wastes, we have largely abandoned to them.

Enter our two central characters, Jack Harper (Cruise) and Victoria (Andrea Riseborough), a two-person team who have been living in a cloud-top tower for the past five years. Soon, we learn, their tour of duty will end, and they can go home to the “Tet,”[9] a giant space station—their mission control—that we see orbiting the earth much like the moon, though considerably less friendly. In their skybound apartment, Jack and Vicka live in an illusory kind of domestic bliss much more familiar to John Cheever’s 1950’s America than anything else.

By this I mean, man and woman fulfill their expected gender roles. Jack goes to work outside while Vicka stays put in their spectacular apartment and greets him with a kiss at the door when he returns. Jack’s job is to fix the drones that get shot up by the “Scavs,” those are the aliens left behind after the war. Vicka, from her tower, monitors Jack’s progress, gives him instructions, and communicates with mission control on the Tet, by means of a desk that is essentially the world’s biggest iPad. Every morning, mission control (Melissa Leo) asks if they are an “effective team,” to which Vicka answers “yes.” Later we learn the dire consequences of being an ineffective team.

If I mention Cheever, it’s because Jack isn’t fully happy with his lot in life. He wonders about things that don’t bother Vicka. He picks up books, clothing, and other loot he finds in the rubble, and carries it off to a hidden valley where trees and grass still grow, and where he’s built a little cabin that runs on wind and solar power, an off the grid paradise. When he offers to take Vicka there, she demurs, citing the regulations that forbid it. She, it seems, has everything she wants. Meanwhile Jack dreams at night of a woman he’s never met, though in the dreams, he’s meeting her on top of the Empire State Building, before the war.

After a brief action sequence where we learn that the Scavs are (maybe) trying to capture rather than kill Jack, we see something falling to earth: part of a human spacecraft that predates the war. At the crash site, Jack finds about half a dozen life pods (eight actually, though two are empty, for reasons we’ll find out later). Jack starts trying to save the survivors, one of whom looks exactly like the woman in his dreams. Drones show up, killing all but the mysterious woman; having saved her, Jack her back to his base, where Vicka seems not at all pleased to see her.

The woman’s name is Julia (Olga Kurylenko), and Jack, who can’t help wanting to know more, takes her back to the crash site in order to find the ship’s flight recorder the next morning. Of course he doesn’t tell Vicka where he’s gone, and we see her waking alone, and then watching, silently through cameras built into Jack’s VTOL craft, as he and this new woman are captured by a group of Scavs.

The Scavs, of course, are not at all what we thought: they’re humans. Survivors of the war, in fact. There is, we learn later, no colony on Titan, and Morgan Freeman, playing the leader of the human resistance, sends Jack and Julia back out into the wastes to find “the truth.” It’s a pretty good twist, all told, but once we’ve learned what the Scavs actually are, they cease to be interesting to us. And Morgan Freeman, as good as he is, is basically playing Morgan Freeman playing Morgan Freeman playing God.

No matter. Jack and Julia ride Jack’s motorbike out into the wastes, arriving finally at the now ground-level observation deck of the Empire State Building. Here we learn the meaning of Jack’s dreams: Julia is his wife. Well, actually she was his wife, but how is that possible? She’s been in stasis for upwards of sixty years, and yet her husband seems not to have aged a day.

Things get complicated here, so I’ll summarize chronologically. We learn that Jack Harper, the real one, was an astronaut on an international mission to Titan. Vicka was his co-pilot. Julia and the other nameless astronauts, killed while still in their lifepods, were in stasis for the long journey. Mission control woke Jack and Vicka early (remember those two empty lifepods?)[10], because long-range sensors had detected a massive alien object (the Tet), and wanted them to investigate. According to the flight recorder Jack and Julia recovered earlier, the Tet began pulling the human vessel toward it, and sensing catastrophe, Jack separates the command module from the rest of the ship, leaving the remainder of the crew (except for Vicka, who—somewhat tellingly—refuses to quit the bridge) to drift in space for the next sixty years. Meanwhile Jack and Vicka, inside the command module, are pulled into the Tet, and disappear.

Shortly thereafter the aliens attack, first by destroying part of the moon, but then by sending an invasion force of cloned Jack Harpers. Humanity didn’t win the war after all, and in fact, Jack and Vicka (both clones) are part of the second wave of the invasion, guarding the machinery that is draining the earth of remaining resources. (Fusion energy and whatnot.)

Vicka, realizing that Jack is abandoning her for Julia, informs mission control of his misbehavior, and mission control turns the drones on all three of them, killing Vicka, and nearly killing Jack, who flees with Julia. Along the way, he encounters another cloned version of himself (who upon seeing Julia, remembers her, too), and another cloned Vicka, squired away in another tower; she too refuses to come down to earth with him.

Jack returns to the Scavs—humans, whatever—and offers to deliver the bomb the humans have been working on to the Tet. Julia offers to make the one-way trip with him; the Tet, after all, has requested that he “bring her in.” As he flies off into space, we watch as Jack listens to the flight recorder, hearing the last moments of the real Jack Harper. The Tet lets him in, and in the center of the ship, he confronts the enemy face to face, a giant (though much smaller than the Tet itself) tetrahedron, with a glowing red eye, that looks like the offspring of Hal 9000 and an iPod. Jack, who brought Morgan Freeman along with him instead of Julia, detonates the bomb, destroying the Tet, and ending the war. As this happens, we see Julia awake at Jack’s cabin in the woods as debris from the explosion burns vapor trails through the sky.

Cut to three years later. Julia is digging in the garden she’s planted near the cabin, vines covered in ripe red tomatoes in the foreground, while a girl who must be her daughter, about two years old now, plays in the background. All of a sudden we see a group of humans, among them familiar faces from the Scav army, arrive in her little secluded home. From the back of the crowd, we see another of the Jack Harper clones, who steps forward to greet her.

IV The Woman in the Tower/ The Woman on the Pedestal

For a story to be successful, no matter how far removed from our own experience, it must at its heart, tell us something about ourselves. For all its flaws, Oblivion does do this, though not in the ways you might expect, and possibly not in the way the filmmakers intended. Numerous critics have pointed out that the film has a lot to do with notions of freedom versus control, and the idea that it’s better to die well, than to live cowering in fear (the film has Jack read a poem from MacCaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome that deals with exactly this question). Many have also noted that the film is in many ways a pastiche of dozens of other films, among them, Planet of the Apes, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Matrix, WALL-E, and, according to Mark Feeney writing in the Boston Globe, “I’m not making this up, Sleepless in Seattle.”

All but the last item on the above list probably makes good sense to most seasoned consumers of science fiction. Ruined grandeur and the remnants of a lost civilization are things that draw our attention; they’re all over our popular culture, in video games, movies, books, and they have been since “Ozymandias.” For some reason, at this particular moment in our culture, we are drawn to feeling at one with our own insignificance.

While this does seem to be the largest thematic element in the movie, what I found most interesting about Oblivion, was the treatment of Vicka.

If Oblivion is a pastiche of various kinds of science fiction stories, it is also a pastiche of various kinds of love stories. Here we see shades of the seven-year itch, of Odysseus returning to Penelope, of self-immolating Dido. Add to this borrowings from more modern romantic comedies. Feeney references Sleepless in Seattle, though it’s important to note that the idea of lovers meeting at the top of the Empire State Building is a trope at least as old1957’s An Affair to Remember, a film explicitly referenced in Norah Ephron’s screenplay.

I alluded earlier to the illusory domestic bliss that governs the first part of the movie. Jack and Vicka’s base consists largely of an apartment that exudes a kind of cool (and cold), sleek modernity that science fiction has been telling us to expect from the future for the past half century. All the same it’s an apartment, of the kind that seems to include all the signifiers of what the living quarters of an upper middle class couple without children should expect from their dual incomes: a chrome-polished, open kitchen, a bath with a massive shower, big windows and sparse, but adequate furnishings. We learn that Jack and Vicka have been living together in this manner for almost five years. Before we learn that they are clones, we’re led to suspect that they have been selected for their compatibility both as team members, as well as sexual partners. For her part, Vicka seems entirely happy with the arrangement, and goes about her work, watching over Jack from her tower, while also keeping house, and fulfilling all the duties that might be expected of a woman within the traditionally repressive American ideal of domesticity.

We don’t ever get to know much about her, not directly anyhow, except that her existence is closely intertwined with Jack’s. It’s not so much that she is dependent on him. Their existence seems to be provided for by the Tet. Her dependence on him seems borne out of an interdependence one might expect to see in a couple.

Meanwhile the story focuses on Jack, and the meaning of the dreams and memories that plague him, and which we eventually learn belong to the man from which this particular clone is derived. The idea that not just a man’s physical traits, but his memories too, might pass through the cloning process may not be a novel idea but it is an interesting one. The film uses the memories as a way of suggesting that some important part of man that Jack once was has survived his cloning, and is in a sense inalienable from who he is.

And yet his yearning is more pedestrian, too. He wonders whether there isn’t more beyond his marriage, if we can call it that, more beyond his job function. He loves the earth, even in its diminished state.

Meanwhile, Vicka seems afraid of the earth. She doesn’t want to stay; and is show  counting the days until the two of them can leave. When Jack brings her a flower he found growing in the dirt, she throws it over the edge of their cloud-shrouded balcony, citing “the regs” and worrying about “toxins” that he might have carried home. And yet, if Vicka wants to continue living at the top of her little tower instead of coming back down to earth, as Jack sometimes asks her to do, it is because this is where she has some manner control over her life. Their base, sterile as it is, is her space, her ascribed domain, and she’s determined to maintain control over it as well as she can.

Vicka represents a very particular kind of femininity. She and the house Jack lives in are one and the same. Her clothes are all shades of white or gray; what very little color we do see on her comes around her eyes, with tracings of red pencil around her fake (or carefully trimmed eyelashes).

One scene in the film features a very detailed closeup view of Vicka’s eyes, showing the elaborate eye makeup she is wearing. [Source: BeyondHollywood]

The visual connection of Vicka and the space she occupies is apparent in virtually every shot of the film. [Source: Screenrant]

Enter Julia in physical form, then, to wreck what the memory of her has already shaken.

It’s not hard to understand Jack’s interest in Julia. In addition to her earlier position in his life, she offers him a window into the truth that’s been hidden from him. Vicka is less enthusiastic: after dutifully reviving Julia in the med bay, and once she’s again alone with Jack, she says, “I want her gone, first thing in the morning.” If this sounds more like a woman confronted with her husband’s ex-wife, that’s because this is precisely what’s happening. The film continues to underscore this idea, with the events that follow, all of which show Vicka’s world being dismantled before her eyes.

Much later, very near the end of the film, while Jack is listening to the flight recorder recovered from Julia’s crashed ship, we don’t just hear him; we also hear Vicka, his copilot. This sequence begins with Jack already on the flight deck, piloting the ship. Meanwhile, we see Vicka simultaneously standing up and zipping up her flight suit as she gets ready to join him. Something happens here that I can’t quite adequately describe, except to say that there is something about the energized, excited look on Vicka’s face that suggests she—at the very least—is more than happy to have Jack all to herself, while his wife remains in her pod. In another moment, she’s in the cockpit behind Jack, holding out a camera to take a picture of herself with Jack; he turns, brushing his face against her. In the photograph, which we later see in their apartment, what looks like affection appears more like incidental contact.

Or is it? As the film suggested earlier, shared work breeds intimacy, perhaps shared, perhaps not between both partners.

In any event, Vicka has scarcely strapped herself into her seat when she and Jack realize they’re being pulled into the object we will come to know as the Tet. As I said earlier, she refuses to leave the flight deck, instead, saying “We’re a team!” And shortly before they disappear into the Tet’s opening, she reaches out to him, and cries out for him as they go to what must be their deaths.

What are we to make of this? For one thing, we know that Vicka has lived through the same experiences as Jack. The cloned Vicka must have memories belonging to her former self, too. Only we must also understand that this means that her wishes have already been fulfilled, and so her refusal to visit the surface with Jack isn’t so much borne out of a lack of curiosity, but instead out of a desire to keep things the way they are. Nothing in the script suggests this; in fact both female leads are denied much in the way of internal lives, which isn’t different from how Hollywood treats most of its female characters. All the same, Riseborough’s performance suggests that this is in fact the case, or, at the very least, the way that she understand the character.

Thematically the film sets up a fundamental opposition between Vicka, who represents a particularly stylized kind of femininity, and Julia, who by film’s end comes to represent another: Julia is, after all, a woman and not a clone. In the final moments of the movie, we watch her tending her garden, digging in the earth and growing food for herself and for her daughter. Julia, then, is doubly fertile where Vicka, who in one scene, prepares dinner for Jack by clipping open vacuum-sealed pouches, represents sterility and death. How Julia has become pregnant isn’t clear: perhaps she was pregnant when she departed on her mission to Titan; perhaps she became pregnant after spending a night with Jack at his hidden cabin. What’s interesting here is how well these two primarily male conceptions of femininity fall into line with ideas that have been in circulation since the nineteenth century. Man wants to denature woman, to reduce her to a mere sexual object, because it suits his desires; what sexuality and desire mean for a woman are of little concern to him, and when they come to the fore, as they do with Vicka’s desires (she’s shown as the sexual aggressor in the relationship, for one thing), they must be repressed and ultimately destroyed. (For further reading, see Nana, for example.)

What this means, for me, in any event, is that the treatment of Vicka within the film proves to be troubling and problematic. All the same, perhaps because Riseborough gives such a thoroughly charming performance, the film seems to reach for a less evident and largely unrealized truth in most science fiction media. For the most part the women we see in science fiction, occupy either the role of the damsel in distress (Princess Leia, in A New Hope), or take on all the attributes of a male action hero (Commander Shepard of the Mass Effect games). Often times, as is the case with Leia, the female character can change from one role to the other, as we see happen over the course of the next two Star Wars movies. What we don’t often see in science fiction is a character who can show us something about what it might be like to be a woman. In this, Oblivion, has admirably, and quite possibly accidentally triumphed.