When Oblivion first came out I’ll admit i was biased against the film. I didn’t know much about the director Joseph Kosinski (Tron: Legacy) or much else, all i know was that it starred Tom Cruise at the height of his Scientology rant and I fucking hated it. Listening more to Susanne Sundfør lately and learning she was feature in the title track with M83 has made me curious. So i decided to track down the origins of the film, who was involved and what their relationship is to L. Ron Hubbard, or who i like to call “That Scientology Fuckwit”.
If you look at the film itself, it’s a beautiful dystopian tale of first contact with a ruthless artificial intelligence that will do anything to obtain the resources it needs to thrive and it will destroy entire civilisations to do so and turn the best of humanity against itself.
But if you dig a little deeper, there’s so much more. To me it points out the struggle between the servitude of the privileged trapped by their own distorted view of the world and belief that everything belongs to them versus the poor on the ground just trying to survive who are seen as nothing more than savage scavenger animals fighting amongst themselves for resources.
This of course hails back to many other dystopian and cyberpunk references including that of Metropolis but it’s perhaps one of the more elegant and stark examples of this ever put into a single node.
The high society of course is a race of clones made up of exactly two people, former astronauts who were captured by the AI, and twisted to do the bidding of their overlord, who appears in the form of their former mission control officer “Sally”.
They live in towers unreachable by the ground unless you have a capable miniature “Lexx” shaped craft, believing that they are the last of humanity to protect the earth from the Scav aliens who threaten the transfer of resources to Titan where humanity is now supposedly settled.
On the ground the Scavs, made up of humans played by creatures such as Morgan Freeman and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau of GOT fame, fight to disrupt the stealing of resources from earth by the alien A.I. Tom Cruise aka “Jack of all trades”, discovered his long lost love which serves as a primer to unlocking the past and providing the human resistance with a chance to destroy the alien A.I once and for all.
Julia, played by the goddamn sexy and no connection to Scientology whatsoever Olga Kurylenko, is compassionate and kind and appeals to Jack’s better judgement acts as said primer. The blockage to the truth is provided by a powerful performance by the flawed but incredibly capable Victoria played by Andrea Riseborough, who equally has nothing to do with Scientology.
I don’t really give a fuck about Tom Cruise and his bullshit religion (As all religion is bullshit) although i generally hear he’s a nice guy and find him to be a competent performer. I wanna focus on the absolutely stunning Women in this film and their amazingly benign and vanilla costumes. After all it’s not called “Machete Cruise”…
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