Joseph Kosinski Says Oblivion Will Be Like Sci-Fi Movies Of The 1970s
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Last week, the release of the International trailer for Oblivion gave people something to be excited for next April. Joseph Kosinski’s follow-up to his first feature film, Tron: Legacy, is gaining a lot of attention. Since the story is an original, Kosinski explained what exactly we’ll see in the new movie and how he captured it in the film’s first trailer.
In an interview with MTV, Kosinski described where his inspiration came from when he and his writing partner, comic book writer Arvid Nelson, first conceived of a lonely future. They were influenced by classic sci-fi movies of the 1970s, including Silent Running and Omega Man. Kosinski told MTV:
So it’s the story of a drill repair man, Jack Harper, who is one of the last human beings left on earth after a massive war, which was the result of an alien invasion. Even though humankind won the war, Earth was left in such a state that we had to look for another place to settle, and Jack is left behind to monitor and secure the resource gathering operation that’s happening where we’re gathering the last bit of energy out of the earth’s seawater in order to move onto the next step.
Once he figured out that Oblivion would have a “last man on Earth” tone, he then put together the pieces of the world of the film.
Visually, I always knew exactly what I wanted the film to look like. Alien is one of my favorite movies of all time, but I feel like after Alien, science fiction kind of went into the dark for a long time. It became about deep space and dark ship holes and it just went into darkness. I liked the idea of bringing science fiction out into the daylight again. So it is a daytime science fiction film where the world is kind of divided into two zones: the world above the clouds and the world below the clouds.
Oblivion looks like it might be a fantastic piece of science fiction. The direction of the film is of some concern considering Tron: Legacy wasn’t the strongest of efforts. But Oblivion has better writers — Michael Arndt (Little Miss Sunshine) and William Monahan (The Departed) — behind the screenplay, so that’s something to consider. Both Arndt and Monahan won Academy Awards for their respective movies. (And Arndt is writing a little sci-fi flick called Star Wars: Episode VII.)
Oblivion will hit theaters everywhere on April 19, 2013 in IMAX.
