Film Review: Tom Cruises Into "Oblivion"...Tediously

If nothing else, "Oblivion" will go down in film history as the movie whereTom Cruise pilots a white, sperm-shaped craft into a giant space uterus. The scene is more interesting to describe than it is to watch. Cruise's sperm-ship enters through an airlock that resembles a geometrized vulva. He arrives inside a massive chamber lined with egg-like glass bubbles. At the center of the chamber is a pulsating, sentient triangle that is also supposed to be some kind of mother figure. Cruise must destroy the mother triangle and her space uterus in order to save the Earth.

Like director Joseph Kosinski's debut, "TRON: Legacy" (2010), "Oblivion" is a special effects extravaganza with a lot of blatant symbolism and very little meaning. It starts slow, turns dull and then becomes tedious — which makes it a marginal improvement over the earlier film. It features shiny surfaces, clicky machinery and no recognizable human behavior. It's equally ambitious and gormless.

"Oblivion" is set in the year 2077, 60 years after an alien invasion rendered the Earth largely uninhabitable. Cruise stars as Jack Harper, one of a handful of people left on the planet. The other survivors have long since relocated to Titan. Harper and colleagues remain as technicians, servicing robot drones that defend resource-gathering stations from alien stragglers.

Harper lives in a penthouse-like tower with his communications officer, Vica (Andrea Riseborough). Vica's eyes are permanently dilated. Like Olivia Wilde's Quorra in "TRON: Legacy," she often resembles a marionette.

Harper and Vica spend their days fixing drones, eating candelit dinners, and swimming in a glass-bottomed pool. Their boss, the creepily cheerful Sally (Melissa Leo), supervises them from an orbiting control center. In order to maintain the integrity of the mission, Harper and Vica's memories have been wiped; nonetheless, Harper is haunted by extremely cheesy black-and-white dreams of a beautiful woman meeting him in pre-invasion New York.

One day, Harper spots an antique spacecraft crashing into the countryside. He manages to rescue one survivor, a Russian astronaut (Olga Kurylenko) who looks exactly like the woman in his dreams. Harper brings her back to his tower. This incites jealousy and suspicion from Vica, who is both Harper's partner and his lover.

The astronaut has been in cryogenic sleep for the past six decades but refuses to disclose the nature of her mission to Harper and Vica until they recover her flight recorder. It goes without saying that the flight recorder unearths all kinds of secrets about Harper, Vica, and the alien invasion. It also creates one of the movie's more glaring logical errors, but that's a different story altogether.

The film's opening stretch is its one strong point —  a gradual, immersive build-up of details. It's a smart technique for science-fiction storytelling; it eases the viewer into the world of the film. The problem is that the world "Oblivion" introduces — an abandoned, depopulated Earth — is more interesting than the story it tells. Or, more accurately, the stories it tells, because "Oblivion," derivative to a fault, tries to be several science-fiction movies at once. It tries and it fails.

"Oblivion" is a political allegory about a lowly "technician" sending unmanned drones to hunt and kill a demonized, alien Other — until it forgets that it ever was. It's a wannabe mindbender that raises questions about its lead character's identity — except that the lead character is too sketchy to make these questions compelling. It's a story about humans struggling for survival in an environment controlled by technology — except it appears to be much more interested in the technology than in the humans. It's a rah-rah action flick — except its action scenes aren't very good.

The only thread "Oblivion" follows to the end is its "creation myth." Harper is an idealized man; he's good with a gun, good with his hands, good in bed, loves football and rides a motorcycle. Though most of the movie's characters are women, not one of them is able to do anything without Harper's help — not even the mother triangle that lives in the space uterus. Only his rugged-but-sensitive masculinity holds the key to humanity's survival. The movie reaches for profundity, but all it grasps is misogyny.

Connor Cruise All Grown Up

Tom Cruise's son has grown up. Check him out below.

Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes Split...Right On Schedule

Of all the rumors about Tom Cruise, one has stuck harder than all the rest.

In 2005, four years after splitting from actress Nicole Kidman, the world's biggest movie star supposedly approached several young Hollywood actresses with an offer of a five-year marriage contract. Among those approached, the rumor goes, were Sofia Vergara, Scarlett Johansson and Katie Holmes, who would go on to become Cruise's third wife. In exchange for marrying Cruise, the bride would receive a career boost and saddles of cash, plus a bonus if she gave birth to a child. For Tom, the marriage would provide him with a child, rehabilitate his increasingly eccentric public image, and finally quash all of those pesky gay rumors.

Now that Holmes has filed for divorce from Cruise, the story has resurfaced with a vengeance. So how true is it? And where did these rumors come from?

"That urban legend probably grew out of a misunderstanding of what actually did occur," said Tony Ortega, editor-in-chief of the Village Voice, in an email to The Huffington Post. Ortega claimed that "several young women were vetted by the church and 'tried out' as Tom's next wife before Katie Holmes was chosen" and that each was required to sign multiple nondisclosure agreements before they dated Cruise -- a "standard procedure in the church."

"The church was being very careful as it helped Tom find a new wife. Although Cruise and the church were successful keeping that quiet at the time, it was only after he and Nicole split up in 2000 that Cruise gradually began getting back into Scientology in a big way," he said.
"By 2004, he was very gung-ho, and the process for finding him a new wife, this one approved by the church, was under way," he said.

Ortega, who has been covering Scientology since 1995, said he has interviewed hundreds of people about the history of the church -- an institution where Cruise ranks second or third in command, according to celebrity biographer Andrew Morton, author of "Tom Cruise: An Authorized Biography."

Morton has reported several details that support Ortega's version of events. In an article published today on the gossip website Celebuzz, Morton claims that, before settling on Holmes, Cruise was smitten with "Modern Family" star Vergara and arranged for an introduction by fellow Scientologist Will Smith. Cruise, Morton writes, had "casually suggested that Vergara join him on a trip to the Scientology Celebrity Centre in Hollywood," but the actress balked at the religion, finding it "cloying and suffocating." One could argue that Vergara failed her audition.

With other actresses, Cruise needed no such personal introductions. Cruise reportedly met both Johansson and Holmes on a different sort of audition -- when they tried out for a role in "Mission Impossible III," which Cruise produced. Johansson was initially slated to co-star in the film, but she dropped out after Cruise allegedly forced Scientology literature on her. Holmes didn't get the role (which eventually went to Michelle Monaghan), but began dating Cruise -- whom she had admired for years -- shortly thereafter. Unlike the other actresses Cruise had approached, Holmes seemed to embrace Scientology. In 2006, she delivered the couple's daughter, Suri, in a "silent birth," a church practice that encourages minimal noise to avoid negatively affecting the mother and child.
As bizarre as Cruise's dating tactics may seem, a source who knows the couple said Cruise was "completely in love with Katie" and that his intentions were well-meaning.

"Does [Cruise] have people who date him sign nondisclosure agreements? I don't know for a fact, but it wouldn't surprise me, as I'm sure a lot of high-profile celebrities do this," said the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "Does that mean it’s a marriage contract? Absolutely not. Do I think Katie is legally bound not to tell certain things? Probably."

Holmes understood from the beginning that Scientology would always be Cruise's top priority, according to the insider. "The church is very involved in their lives and has been from the beginning. Katie was aware of this and she willingly went into this marriage, so to act like she’s some kind of victim is somewhat insincere."

Though Holmes, 33, and Cruise, 49, are likely to remain mum as their divorce unfolds, one convincing argument against the contract rumor has come from Holmes herself. In her divorce filing, the actress asked for sole custody of 6-year-old Suri. Surely, any pre-existing contract would have prevented Holmes from taking Suri away from Cruise altogether.

At least Suri will have company when she's returned to the prop department.