Oblivion (2013)
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A maintenance technician on a desolate Earth discovers a mysterious woman and begins to question the truth of his mission.
The story
In 2077, Earth is a desolate wasteland following a devastating war against an alien force. Jack, a maintenance technician, and his partner Victoria work on a remote outpost, believing they are preparing to join a human colony on Saturn's moon, Titan. Their routine is disrupted when Jack recovers a woman, Julia, from a crashed space pod. As Jack protects her from pursuing forces, he begins to experience memories of a past he doesn't recognize, leading him to question his role in the conflict and the true nature of the war that ravaged the planet.
Full plot (contains spoilers)
Sixty years after an alien invasion destroyed the Moon and rendered Earth uninhabitable, Jack and Victoria are technicians on a remote outpost. Jack, haunted by dreams of a woman, finds Julia in a crashed pod. They are captured by the Scavengers, a group of human survivors led by Malcolm. Malcolm reveals that the 'Tet'—an alien intelligence—is actually harvesting Earth's resources, and the 'colony' Jack is headed to is a lie. Jack learns he is a clone of the original Jack Harper, who was captured and cloned by the Tet to fight humanity. After a series of skirmishes and the death of Victoria, Jack and Julia flee into a radiation zone. There, they encounter another clone of Jack. They eventually discover the truth of the original mission: Jack and Victoria were astronauts who were captured by the Tet. In a final act of defiance, Jack delivers a nuclear bomb to the Tet's headquarters, destroying the alien intelligence and themselves. Julia survives in a stasis pod and awakens three years later at a cabin, where she eventually discovers she has a daughter with the original Jack.
- First release year
- 2013
- Runtime (minutes)
- 124
- Production countries
- United States
- Original languages
- English
- Directors
- Joseph Kosinski
- Writers
- Karl Gajdusek · screenplay; Michael deBruyn · screenplay
- Cast and characters
- Tom Cruise · Jack Harper; Morgan Freeman · Malcolm Beech; Olga Kurylenko · Julia Rusakova Harper; Andrea Riseborough · Victoria "Vika" Olsen; Nikolaj Coster-Waldau · Sergeant Sykes; Melissa Leo · the Tet
- Genres
- post-apocalyptic; science fiction; action
- Themes
- memory; identity; war
- Tone and mood
- epic; poetic; action-oriented
- Premise and plot tags
- post-apocalyptic; space exploration; cloning; artificial intelligence
- Source material / true-story basis
- Radical Comics graphic novel
- Reception
- The film received mixed reviews from critics, with praise for its visual style and Tom Cruise's performance, but criticism regarding its script and pacing.
- Reported review scores
- Metacritic · score: 54 · scale: 100 · review count: 41
- Production trivia
- The film's script was praised by Universal as one of the most beautiful they had ever seen.
Film metadata comes from the open sources listed in Credits & Contact. Catalogue details may be incomplete.
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