Kosinski: Oblivion (2013)

Oblivion revolves around the last two people left on Earth – Jack Harper (Tom Cruise), a pilot, and Victoria Olsen (Andrea Riseborough), a communications analyst – in the wake of mass migration to one of Jupiter’s moons. For most of the film, they are the only characters, as Joseph Kosinski leads us through a series of serene, crystalline, ambient sequences, in which Jack patrols the surface of the planet, and reports back to Victoria, stationed in a console pod above the clouds. While advertisements suggested the apocalyptic monumentalism of Roland Emmerich or Michael Bay, Kosinski's vision is more of a steady-state universe, folding the decimation of the Earth’s surface back into a more cosmic equilibrium. Although Jack spends most of his time in the air, there’s really no difference between flying and any other type of movement: the planet is as isomorphic as a wheatfield, dovetailing the liquid clarity of 2001: A Space Odyssey with the invisible grids and contourless lines of Tron: Legacy. Based on Kosinski’s pitch for a graphic novel of the same name, it often feels like the pitch itself – a series of radiant, weightless images, or concepts of images that haven’t quite yet emerged. And part of what makes it so powerful is that Jack and Victoria have had mandatory brain wipes before commencing their work on Earth, meaning that this is also a world in which memory has not yet emerged, and thought itself is still emergent. Perhaps that’s why the senses don’t feel quite differentiated either – Victoria never visits the Earth’s surface, monitoring everything from her bank of touchscreens – making for a film that yearns to be experienced kinaesthetically, as well as visually. On the one hand, that means a film that yearns to be touched as well as seen, as Kosiniski once again amps up the electronic score – this time it’s by M83 – to send a continual pulse across the screen, the incipient ripple of a touchscreen. But it also means a film that yearns for a tactile intermediary, a console between viewer and screen – after all, we only really experience Jack through Victoria’s consoles for most of the film, as he turns into an avatar who has broken away from his gamer. It all builds to a quite extraordinary conclusion, as Kosinski presents something like a console as a nemesis, in one of the most disarming sci-fi spectres since HAL. Of course, it's not 2001 - nothing could be - but, in style and spirit, it's probably the closest we're likely to get to the object-oriented, console-driven dramas of 3001: The Final Odyssey, which, Kosinski suggests, could never be made into a film, but only a film on the verge of becoming something else.