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Ambitious, cerebral science fiction on the big screen is hard to find. Even films from the golden era of the late 1960s and 70s such as Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey or Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris are often defined by their very enigma, as if the secrets of the cosmos are too mindblowing for mere humans to even contemplate. These days Hollywood tends to prefer simpler space opera fare when it comes to the big budgets, which is why Joseph Kosinski's Oblivion is such an intriguing prospect.
Oblivion is the first of a duo of Tom Cruise sci-fi movies which will be hitting cinemas over the next couple of years. The second is an alien invasion flick titled All You Need is Kill which, would appear to sit at the opposite end of the spectrum: it is based on a graphic novel by Kosinski himself that was published in 2009. This week a new still hit the web to follow last month's debut trailer.
Oblivion centres on a late 21st century drone repairman named Jack Harper (Cruise) who patrols an abandoned, ruined Earth that was mostly destroyed in a war with alien invaders 60 years earlier (humanity now lives above the clouds in sky cities). One day while out on the Earth's surface, Harper rescues an attractive female stranger (Quantum of Solace's Olga Kurylenko) from a downed spacecraft. In the words of the official synopsis "her arrival triggers a chain of events that forces him to question everything that he knows".
Kosinski, who you may remember as the director of the half-baked Tron: Legacy in 2010, has been keeping pretty tight-lipped about his new movie, but there is a bit more out there in the web on the subject of the comic book. The film-maker told Comic Book Resources two years ago:
It's a sci-fi adventure that spans two different worlds and two different times. It's epic in terms of its scale and scope, but it's a character driven story with a small cast. I first came up with the concept when I moved from New York to Los Angeles. I was inspired by old sci-fi models like The Twilight Zone to find an emotional, dramatic story that would raise interesting questions and play with perspective. I wanted to build the story around those few characters, but at the same time ask the bigger universal questions that are integral to science fiction, questions about our existence, our purpose in the big scheme of things. The main character, Jak, is an ex-soldier who works as a drone repairman on this barren planet. He fixes the drones that patrol the surface looking to destroy what's left of the Scavengers, a savage alien race. Jak has a partner, Vika, who's a by the book kind of career officer and she works as his "eye in the sky," scanning for damaged drones and monitoring Scavenger activity. One day, Jak comes across a spacecraft that's crashed, and inside he finds this mysterious woman in "deltasleep". He rescues her from the Scavengers and takes her back to their Skytower, which is high above the clouds. When the woman wakes up, her story turns their lives upside down and sends each of them on an adventure of self-discovery.
Bear in mind that the story might easily have shifted as it is pushed into celluloid form. Slash Film featured a synopsis for the comic book around the time of Kosinski's comments that included themes of cloning and mysterious, vast space objects. Have a look here if you're feeling brave, though I expect too much information might spoil the film for you.
In any case, publisher Radical Comics has called the description of the story as out of date; I have to say I rather hope it is, because mysterious aliens, strange space objects and cloning are just about the most obvious tropes one can imagine for a supposedly cerebral sci-fi flick. Coupled with the distinctly WALL-E-style nature of Cruise's job, Oblivion would have to try pretty hard to jam in any more cliches. If Earth's secret turns out to be that it's no longer polluted and everyone can come down from their cloud cities and start playing football again, I for one am not going to be impressed.
But let's be optimistic. The trailer for the film posits a nicely washed out, clean and unencumbered vision of the future that's clearly just waiting to be undercut by a potentially awful dirty little secret. The cast looks excellent, with Morgan Freeman as a grizzled Earth dweller just primed to fill Cruise in on what he's been missing, and Andrea Riseborough as the colleague who seems rather too keen to stem our hero's inquisitive nature. (The Fighter's Melissa Leo and Game of Thrones' Nikolaj Coster-Waldau are there too.) Kurylenko got the role ahead of Jessica Chastain, Olivia Wilde and Noomi Rapace, so certainly has something to prove. Might this be a movie that manages to marry blockbuster spectacle with 1970s sci-fi intrigue, like a Solaris meets Independence Day hybrid? We'll find out in April when the film hits cinemas on both sides of the Atlantic.
Second up for Cruise is the aforementioned All You Need Is Kill, which is due to arrive in 2014 and has already been shooting in Trafalgar Square, London, causing a stir in November. Directed by Doug Liman of Swingers and The Bourne Identity notoriety and based on the Japanese young adult novel of the same name, it co-stars Emily Blunt, iconic Aliens star Bill Paxton, Lost's Charlotte Riley and Jonas Armstrong of Robin Hood (the BBC TV take) fame.
The film revolves around an intriguing Groundhog Day-style premise whereby a rookie lieutenant colonel named Bill Cage (Cruise) is forced to fight the same losing battle against alien invaders again and again, experiencing horrifying death countless times. Having started out without a single day of combat experience, Cage slowly morphs into a battle-hardened veteran with the skills and knowledge to fend off the extraterrestrial Mimics. Blunt plays a special forces veteran who has taken out more of the aliens than anyone else.
Unlike Oblivion, All You Need Is Kill seems unlikely to have us leaving the cinema pondering the mysteries of the multiverse, and more likely to have us pondering the video game-style awesomeness of battling alien invaders when you have inexhaustible lives and endless units of time within which to achieve outlandish victory.
