Oblivion’s Many Plotholes Are Brought Down To The Surface In This Video
This article is more than 2 years old
For the second time in two years, Tom Cruise is going into the sci-fi future (and then the past, over and over again), this time for Doug Liman’s action thriller Edge of Tomorrow. So what better time than now to look back on his last movie, Joseph Kosinski’s visually splendid but brick-dumb Oblivion, and laugh at it for all of its trite, glaring faults? We are nothing if not impishly immature here at GFR. But hey, we don’t make these videos. (That’s jealousy talking.)
The lively CinemaSins crew are back with another extended installment of their always humorous series highlighting the faults of popular movies. After I watched Oblivion for the first time, I couldn’t wait to see it skewered by these guys, but it took an entire year for them to get to it. Which is perfectly fine, since CinemaSins no longer hold themselves to short time limits. This movie needs all the time in the world to get to its problems.
Don’t get me wrong, I halfway enjoyed watching Oblivion, probably because I couldn’t possibly have realized everything pointed out in the video as I was taking it all in. But a lot of it was obvious. The doubled-up narration and exposition was a definite WTF, as nothing about the plot is so complicated that it needed to be delivered twice. And nearly everything involving the Tet and the memory wiping and Melissa Leo’s “sorta villain” and Olga Kurylenko’s mysteriousness and the clones and the subterranean humans and (fill in the blank) required all manner of suspended disbelief to follow along without screaming at a script supervisor. If the word “cliché” ever needed to be replaced by another word, “Obvlivion” would work just fine. Then we’d have to find another word to describe what oblivion currently means, but it’d be worth it.
And then there are the more harmless gaffes, such as the inaccuracy of where the Super Bowl will be held in 2017. I know football doesn’t come up much here, but the Houston Texans and Tony Romo slams were my favorite jokes. Plus, now we know that Tom Cruise’s stunt double doesn’t look much like Tom Cruise.
I have a feeling I won’t be nearly as hard on the movie if I ever watch it again, as my expectations will be nowhere near as high. (Also nowhere near as high as I’d have to be to watch it again.) Time will tell if it will be a suitable double feature with Edge of Tomorrow, which also revolves around aliens coming to Earth and trying to wipe out the population. Only with a better director and an Oscar-winning co-screenwriter. See it in theaters on June 6 and keep the big-budget sci-fi train rolling.
