dvd of the week
If you forget that you hate Tom Cruise, you may like him in Oblivion, which is a serious, artful science fiction film hidden behind the veneer of a shoot-‘em-up blockbuster. Cruise plays Jack Harper, who along with his girlfriend Victoria (a most excellent Andrea Riseborough), is tasked with managing and repairing an army of flying, armed orbs that are protecting massive hydropower machines hovering over the ocean. Seventy years earlier, aliens destroyed the moon, causing worldwide disaster, and then they invaded Earth. Earth won the war after nuking their enemies, but that made the planet uninhabitable. The survivors have fled to Titan, one of Saturn’s moons. Jack and Julia are part of the clean-up crew, helping make sure those hydropower machines create the energy needed on Titan. But a strange event leads Jack to discover everything he believes is wrong. Morgan Freeman is the one who tells him. The movie is gorgeous and suspenseful, if a little dopey when it goes blockbuster. But director Joseph Kosinski does great work, and the movie is certainly worth making an effort for.
