The other day, I caught a matinee of Oblivion at the Cinerama, and let me assure you: If you have to watch Oblivion, you should watch it at the Cinerama. The beautiful post-apocalyptic design of the film is crisp and almost overwhelming on the Cinerama's mammoth screen. But you really shouldn't feel as though you have to watch Oblivion. Oblivion seems to exist because some Hollywood executive saw a few excellent older and low-budget science fiction movies and then thought to himself, "You know what would make these movies better? Tom Cruise!" And that's not true. Tom Cruise would not make those movies better. (Tom Cruise hasn't made a movie better since Magnolia, and even then, I suspect that Paul Thomas Anderson used directorial judo to get a good performance out of Cruise against Cruise's own will.) Oblivion is science fiction for people who don't like science fiction, an attempt at a four-quadrant, global blockbuster by a committee of people stuffed full of contempt for their audience.
Outside of the tech design, there's not one original thought on display here, not in the Hans Zimmer knockoff score, not in the mediocre Morgan Freeman performance, not in the lame story that tries to handwave away one of the dumbest, most obvious sci-fi tropes in the movie's first few minutes. (When a character in a sci-fi movie refers to the fact that he's been mind-wiped right out of the gate, you know there are Deep Dark Secrets on the way, and probably a Lame Twist, too.) Not every good movie needs to be original, but every good movie needs to feel like it has a reason for existing. "Starring Tom Cruise" is not a reason to exist.
I left Oblivion wanting to remember what a good movie feels like, so I rushed across town and made it just in time to a late-afternoon screening of Upstream Color at SIFF Cinema at the Uptown. By any metric besides loudness, Upstream Color is the superior science fiction movie in comparison with Oblivion. It takes a single sci-fi premise (mind control) and inserts that premise into a believable world, then spins out the idea to see what happens.
Upstream Color isn't as willfully obtuse as writer/director/star Shane Carruth's previous movie, Primer*. In fact, it spends the first few minutes very carefully explaining the sci-fi premise to its viewers. This isn't spoon-feeding, mind you; someone checking their phone or carrying on a conversation during Upstream Color would be totally lost, because almost every frame of the film is packed with meaning. And then it spends the rest of its runtime contemplating the consequences of that premise. (Charles Mudede doesn't like the end of Upstream Color; I think it works in that it's so gutsy about finding a resolution and sticking to it that it earns every second of that resolution.) It's a creepy film, a romantic film, a beautiful film, a sad film, and a satisfying film, which means that it successfully evokes just about every emotion that Oblivion should try to evoke in its viewers. Oblivion leaves you feeling full of popcorn and slightly nauseous. Upstream Color makes you feel like you just came back from a familiar-but-alien world. It's the best sci-fi movie I've seen in a while.
* I am all for smart movies that make the viewer think, but the fact is that not all the information a viewer needed to understand Primer was available to the viewer during Primer. All the fan theories about the film require a leap of logic that the film doesn't provide evidence to support. I enjoyed Primer, but it's a very flawed experience, because Carruth didn't manage to tell the whole story.
