Oblivion

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Mr. Oragahn
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Oblivion

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sun Sep 22, 2013 1:28 am

The trailer barely had me want to watch the movie.
I finally gave in and after a few clicks... okay, no ticket, got it?
I would not pay a ticket for that. But eventually if the movie turned out to be good, I'd buy the DVD for sure.

Well, thing is, the movie is mind blowing when it comes to visuals.

But the rest, it feels barely half finished and empty. Typical action movie tropes are over used. Like no missiles... heat rays so there's no blood at all... enemy which will kill you BUT someone saves the day at the last second... again... guns that keep firing but don't seem to hit shit beond 20 meters range.

How come human clones not get suspicious after being served the same lonesome Sally for weeks, without a single brain reboot at all? We know from the main character, Jack something, that memory is hardly rebooting every two days cause he has developped a nice little haven of his own in some greenery area and that obviously took some time.

The effects are pretty, the way they shot the Sky Tower is truly amzing on set, and the mood and sound is a good performance by M83 (which is surprising because the rest of their discography is hardly that memorable in fact, curiously enough).

Tom Cruise Mapother IV (yeah...) somehow manages you to make your forget that it's Cruise. It's not perfect, but he's actually maturing, even simply physically, and getting roles which tend to be humbler and more reasonnable as time passes.

The big reveal about the scavs was bleh...

Now, on the technical side, in-universe...

Despite its size and power potential, the Tet is far too inefficient and illogical in ways to pass as a weapon of mass destruction.

I could easily understand it as a borked terraforming system, complete with cloning capacity, either for cheap labour, repair crews and defenses crews or simply because the Tet was made by people who relied on cloning tech, or because of purely cultural reasons.

The station itself is way too big, just as the elements it deposits or builds on Earth, to be a pure weapon of war, if it ever were meant to be one.

I really like the AI gone mad, thinking itself of a god on its own creations, and equally capable of "creating" worlds (after scavenging others). When you can bust large moons... you do have some reason to start suffering some delusional ideas about oneself.

Unless the ship can completely reconfigure itself (possible, all of which could have happened to be compatible with the requirements of a species known for sending signals into space for free about what it looks like), I'd think the creators of the Tet, if there had been any, would have had a similar size as humans.

Although we see the cloning vats, but we see nothing of the labour and nurturing devices needed to take care of clones, dress them and install stuff on planets.

The reason why I tend to consider it was a "good" project gone mad is that I don't see the point, if even a purely ideologically crazy one, just for the sake of it you know, to have to rely on meatbags.

The Tet clearly has strict limitations. Why not different types of drones, otherwise?
Why, with so much potential intelligence, still "assimilate" the data obtained from the copied humans and the bribes of communication with Sally and so forth?
Why have crappy communication at all? Why not even bother to make the clone workers see more humans other than just Sally supposedly waiting on the Tet?
Especially since the AI can feed the crews with fake visual data about the scavs.
The Tet's AI somehow appears a bit... infantile, naïve.

Returning to the critique of the movie for a moment, that elusive AI behaviour is really a problem for the movie, because as it is illogical in many ways, I couldn't stop asking myself why the hell this or that happens that way and not this way, etc.
And with Hollywood being what it is, instead of being able to tell yourself oh but it's actually going to make all sense in half an hour, you just can't shake off the idea that the movie will end and those problems won't be solved at all by then.

And the ending's quite dumb. Plus how could the super massive Tet be destroyed so easily from within by a mere nuke of that power?

And the inside of the Tet is silly. Why not a single extra platform, just for... I don't know, because it's a fucking huge station of some sort and there's clearly plenty of clones who will need some platforms or at least tunnels, force fields or something... and those sentries could act as eyes... oh they actually do, but for some reason, the AI decides to appear naked in front of the heroes just for the sake of.... what?

And so many other points which I'm not even sure any kind of rationalization would explain unless you just shrugg and tuck them under the mat, under the convenient guise of broken AI!!1!

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