The Gates of Oblivion

You know it's still early in 2013 when I'm having a hard time even recommending that you see one of the more action-oriented science fiction stories outside the Summer movie season. After being floored by the big screen visual wonders of director Joseph Kosinski's feature debut Tron: Legacy, getting to see his followup in the form of a post-apocalyptic tale like Oblivion ought to have been a guaranteed treat. After all, this wasn't just a random story, but one Kosinski had been attempting to make for years in homage to sci-fi movies from the seventies (even co-writing the screenplay with The Departed's William Monahan, Toy Story 3's Michael Arndt and Karl Gajdusek). Combining his love of the genre with his innate mastery of all things visual, the oddly-named Oblivion should have been the kind of mysterious, fun thrill ride that forced you to see it on the big screen. So why am I having such a hard time recommending it?

Yankee fandom will never die, it seems.

It's certainly not the concept that falters. Sixty years after aliens known as Scavs destroyed our Moon and most of the planet, the surviving remnants of humanity are now off-world, transported to the orbital space station known as the "Tet" in preparation of being transported to a new colony on Titan. Left on the planet are technician Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) and his communications officer Victoria (Andrea Riseborough), tasked with maintaining the security drones that protect operations that mine Earth's natural resources for use on our new home. While Victoria can't wait to leave, Jack is the curious type, always searching for new discoveries and dreading the coming time when he will have to leave what he considers his home. But a crashed shuttle pod with a human survivor raises all kinds of questions about their mission, especially when that survivor (Olga Kurylenko) seems to have some mysterious connection to Jack's missing past.

The Scientologists are invading!

The acting and special effects are both as strong as the concept they are wrapped around. Cruise of course no longer needs to stretch his abilities for his movies to be successful (so far), but here he actually displays more than his trademark charm, parsing a bit of genuine emotion for good measure as well. Of course, he's well within his action wheelhouse, and it's difficult to imagine the now-51 year-old slowing down anytime soon, and certainly not if he can keep putting forth good performances like the one he showcases here. His female leads struggle a little, not via lack of talent but more through lack of romantic chemistry with Cruise. Even if you can get past their age differences (both Kurylenko and Riseborough are almost twenty years Cruise's younger), their inability to connect on-screen with their lead actor only hampers their performances and the story. They still put together good efforts, albeit flawed ones. The cast is rounded out by solid and expected showings from Morgan Freeman, Melissa Leo and Nikolaj Coster-Waldeau (who is having a very good 2013, himself), populating the mostly-lifeless Earth with enough personality to keep the audience invested.

And wait... it that Zoe Bell?

As for the effects and action, they're everything we've come to expect from Kosinski, whose Tron sequel was visually amazing despite the story's irregularities. Earth is a cratered wasteland, but the director adds depth to the surroundings via famous destroyed landmarks, gorgeous vistas and little slices of natural heaven. Unlike many end-of-the-world movies, he doesn't just coat everything in grey in post-production to add mood. You get the feeling that he's got an emotional attachment to his imagery, and that he really puts his whole heart into what you watching. It's also the biggest and best argument for seeing Oblivion on the big screen, if not necessarily in 3D or IMAX; these exquisite visuals simply may not translate when introduced to your too-small television screen, or underpowered DVD players (sorry, but at this point it's officially past time you upgraded to Blu-ray).

That's a lot of resource-harvesting action.

And you'll need those visuals to get past Oblivion's biggest flaw; the story is just not there. It's not that it's a bad tale, or even all that poorly-told. You'll genuinely be engaged by plot twists, progressive storytelling and a competent if overly-direct vision; Kosinski doesn't quite trust his audience yet, and so he plugs everything important into the center of the shot so that you can by no means miss so obvious or clever a moment. A bit of subtlety couldn't have hurt, but patience is often the game of veteran directors (and even they don't always get it right), and so his youthful inexperience isn't the detraction it perhaps could have been. Instead, Oblivion's biggest issue is that it brings absolutely nothing to the table. It might have started off as homage, but unlike JJ Abrams' Super 8 - which successfully paid respect to early Steven Spielberg without outright copying him - Kosinski cannot help but crib from his superiors, borrowing plot, themes and sequences from classics such as Wall-E, Moon, District 9, the Matrix Trilogy, 2001 and Independence Day, and that's just scraping the surface.

Soooo, you couldn't see this coming?

You won't find a better example of Hollywood hubris than that of a seemingly original tale that brings absolutely nothing new of note to show. How many sequels a year are we getting from the movie industry? How many remakes? At least we know what we're getting into when we buy a ticket to those. Oblivion is gorgeously designed, well-acted, and certainly cannot be called a waste of time should you decide to venture out and see it right now, not even by me. But there's just no REASON for it, sitting through over two hours of material you could cobble together from a home movie collection. It's a fine time suck if you really have nothing better to watch, but with Iron Man 3 just over the horizon and the true pantheon of summer action movies not far behind, soon you'll be able to do much better than this second-rate sci-fi flick, which won't likely be remembered come the year's end.

Open Letters Monthly: Jack Reacher

Sometimes what you really need to get through the day is a mindless action flick that doesn't challenge you but still leaves you feeling fulfilled. Thankfully, Tom Cruise has been pumping these types of movies out regularly since his early acting days, and his latest, Jack Reacher, might be just the thing to see if you're not interested in uber-violent revenge tales or Parisian musicals.

When a former Army sniper is arrested and accused of murdering five innocent people in a public park, he is asked to confess. Instead, he insists that it was not him and tells them one thing: "Get Jack Reacher." Reacher is a former Military Policeman with a killer investigative mind. When he puts the pieces together, he realizes that the arrested man has been framed, and starts to ask question and break skulls until things start to make sense. But a shadow group doesn't want him finding the truth, and soon target the unstoppable Reacher with a vengeance.

Jack Reacher is directed by Christopher McQuarrie and stars Tom Cruise, Rosamund Pike, Richard Jenkins, Werner Herzog, David Oyelowo and Robert Duvall.

Click here for the full review at Open Letters Monthly.

Movie Monday: Rock of Ages

This weekend didn't offer much in the way of "great" entertainment, so Todd and I flipped a coin and saw Rock of Ages, the musical based on the Broadway show of the same name. We weren't sure what to expect, but we were certainly hoping that it couldn't be worse than attending That's My Boy.

In 1987 Los Angeles, two young singers trying to get their big breaks in Hollywood are Sherrie and Detroit-born Drew. Meeting by chance, the pair fall in love, but enter conflict when success shows itself on the horizon. Legendary rock band Arsenal is about to put on their final show before legendary rocker Stacee Jaxx embarks on his solo career, a concert that will save the Sunset Strip's iconic bar/showroom The Bourbon Room, and its embattered owner, from financial ruin. But The Bourbon Room, the Strip, and rock & roll finds itself under fire from religious conservatives, led by the mayor's wife, who seems to have a special grudge against the soon-to-be-solo Jaxx.

Rock of Ages is directed by Hairspray's Adam Shankman and stars Julianne Hough, Diego Boneta, Russell Brand, Paul Giamatti, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Mary J Blige, Malin Akerman, Alec Baldwin and Tom Cruise. It also features music from Poison, Bon Jovi, Twisted Sister, REO Speedwagon, Journey, Foreigner, Def Leppard, and other eighties bands, and an original song by Porcelain Black.


Click here for the full review at Open Letters Monthly.

A Tom Cruise Horror Story

The search for last minute additions to 2011's "Worst Of" list continues. Today's contender is the latest in Tom Cruise's popular Mission Impossible films, code-named Ghost Protocol. It's relative easy to write off Tom Cruise these days. Ever since he decided he was going to act all bat-shit crazy, his box office performance went from "sure thing" to "meh" in a heartbeat and although he's still a profitable actor, he's nowhere near the superstar he was a decade ago. Thankfully for his agent, there's still one franchise that is completely under his control, and that's the Mission Impossible series. With both his sexuality and religion constantly under fire, it must be nice to be able to make an escapist film with zero elements of realism and earn a ton of cash doing so. In this latest installment, Cruise upped the ante by bringing in such talented performers as Jeremy Renner, Paula Patton and Michael Nyqvist, not to mention director Brad Bird in his live action film debut. So will this latest entry have the same draw as the series' earlier titles? I'd be content knowing whether or not it was any good.

Tom Cruise: rugged and loving it

After his IMF unit breaks him out of a Russian prison, super-spy Ethan Hunt (Cruise) is tasked with the mission of breaking into the Kremlin to extract sensitive nuclear launch information before it can be appropriated by a fanatic intent on starting a worldwide nuclear holocaust. When they fail and the Kremlin is bombed in a related attack, Hunt and his team are blamed, forcing the US President to declare "Ghost Protocol" in effect, disavowing the IMF completely. Now this small group must stop terrorist Kurt Hendricks (Nyqvist) from successfully launching a nuclear warhead, and they must do it without backup, support or any allies to fall back on. Win or lose, they must do it on the fly and with whatever materials they can scrounge up, from Moscow to India and home again.

Yes, Simon Pegg is here... I'm not sure why, exactly, but there you are

As in all the previous Mission Impossible titles, you have to keep a very high measure of disbelief in your system throughout most of your viewing. There is so much that happens, and the heroes (especially Cruise) are banged up so much over the course of the film that it's a shock they can still stand through most of it. Adrenaline and sheer willpower can only take you so far, after all. Still, Ghost Protocol does have some truly exciting sequences, and spread throughout the film to boot. There's no one moment that stands out as best from the others, though sufferers of Acrophobia will probably find it impossible to watch Ethan Hunt scale a portion of Dubai's Burj Kalifa without a safety harness. It's a difficult scene to watch even without the ever-present sense of vertigo setting in. Other standouts include Hunt chasing a target through a sandstorm and Agent Brandt (Renner) diving into a tunnel to get "caught" before he can impact with a giant turbine. The special effects are consistent throughout, with only a few moments looking obviously tweaked beyond the realistic. Bird's live-action directorial debut obviously could have benefited with a step further from the animation that he's used to working with, but to be honest the difference would have been negligible at best.

I'm guessing they can't hear him now. Good.

The acting, like the SFX, is if nothing else consistent. This is the type of film where most actors can get by on their charm, and for most of the people here, that is true. It's certainly the case for Cruise, who (ahem) cruises through everything that happens with a cool face of detachment, except for the few moments in the script that call for mild frustration. Despite his relative career downturn, Cruise hasn't needed to act in almost a decade, and when all he apparently does these days is action films, that's understandable. Less understandable is when a talented performer such as Paula Patton falls in that trap, an actress who has nowhere near the career cachet to justify oozing with charm without bringing more to the table. There's plenty of opportunity for her character to grow, but sadly that never really seems to happen. Simon Pegg is the comedic sidekick and he knows it, but apparently the script didn't, and Pegg does more than you might expect, though it was nice to see him bring a levity among the critically serious characters around him. Veteran actors Tom Wilkinson and Anil Kapoor also do little, with Wilkinson playing his small role as dry as the Sahara, and Kapoor doing just the opposite, playing up on the charm he exuded in 2008's Oscar winner Slumdog Millionaire.

The best deterrent against catcalls

But there are still a few actors who defy the shallowness of their roles. It's a shame to see that this year Michael Nyqvist has followed up arguably his most successful heroic role (that of Mikael Blomkvist in the Swedish adaptation of the Millennium series) with two cliched villain parts, first in the stinker Abduction and now this. He's a far more talented actor than he's being given a chance to be in Hollywood, and I wonder how long the good will is to last for him on the big screen in the good ol' USA. Still, he does do menacing well, and his final battle with Ethan Hunt at the film's finale is nothing if not believable. Lea Seydoux also stands out as a French assassin for hire, though she only appears in a few scenes of note. Finally, Jeremy Renner plays the only member of the four-person IMF team given real character development, and he is the only one who actually acts his way through the entirety of the movie. Renner is quickly becoming a true superstar, and I'm happy to see him rise to such heights from the relative success of 2009's The Hurt Locker.

Don't look down don't look down don't look down...

Between the action, special effects, and a liberal dose of humor that doesn't overpower the seriousness of the situations presented in the film, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol does a better than average job of entertaining its audience. It's not a very good movie overall, but nobody expects that of franchise action films these days, and this entry is no different from any similar release. That's it's biggest drawback, of course; you could have literally stayed home and rented any other action film (or an earlier Mission Impossible) and gotten exactly the same amount of fun from that than you would from Ghost Protocol. Still, it's nowhere near as poor as you can imagine, and should ensure more entries to the Mission Impossible series before too long. After all, Tom Cruise has to make money SOMEHOW.