The fantasy film on TV tonight: “Oblivion” Thursday, September 5, 2024, at 21:20 on Italia 1 – Oblivion is a film from 2013 written, directed, and produced by Joseph Kosinski, starring Tom Cruise, Morgan Freeman, Olga Kurylenko, Andrea Riseborough, and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau.
Set in a post-apocalyptic world in 2077, following an alien invasion and the consequent nuclear war won by the humans against the extraterrestrials known as Scavengers, the film revolves around Jack Harper, a technician stationed on the now-abandoned Earth, as it is contaminated by radiation and ravaged by storms caused by the destruction of the Moon. oblivion
He lives in a house 2000 meters high on a tower with Victoria; their task is to ensure the integrity and functionality of the hydro-drills, giant machines that suck water from the oceans to create new energy, and to maintain the drones, sophisticated flying warrior robots programmed to exterminate any surviving Scavengers and protect the hydro-drills. oblivion
So that Jack can better perform his mission without disturbances or doubts, all memory of his past life has been erased. oblivion
The couple, through video communications, takes orders from “Sally”, a woman who resides in the Tet, a massive space colony shaped like a tetrahedron that orbits around Earth and houses the last survivors waiting to leave Earth for Titan, the new habitat chosen by humans for survival. When the hydro-drills have collected enough energy for the Tet, Jack and Victoria will permanently leave the tower for their new home. oblivion
Jack is often tormented by dreams and flashbacks related to New York before the invasion of the Scavengers and by recurring visions of a mysterious woman; he does not want to convince himself that Earth is entirely lost as he has discovered a place, on the shores of a lake, where the soil is fertile and alive and where he has built a hut to store objects from the past. oblivion
Victoria, on the other hand, just wants to complete the mission and leave Earth forever. Only two weeks remain until departure, but Jack wants to know why the surviving Scavengers have become more aggressive and how they managed to disable numerous drones by stealing their batteries.
During one of the patrols aboard his aircraft, Jack enters an underground crevice looking for what he thinks is a malfunctioning drone that needs repairing, but he actually gets trapped and is nearly captured by the Scavengers, until another drone arrives to rescue him by killing them all.
At dawn the next day, Jack and Victoria are awakened by the explosion of a hydro-drill: Jack goes to the site and discovers that the cause of the destruction was a power cell from a drone. Later, he is sent by Victoria to investigate an unknown and suspicious signal and discovers it is emanating from an alien radio beacon: he begins to wonder what their intentions are and why they only tried to capture him but not kill him. Later, while resting in his paradise corner, Jack sees a spacecraft plummet from the sky, attracted by the alien beacon. Despite Sally’s orders for him to return, Jack goes to the impact site and finds the wreckage of a spacecraft, the Odyssey, and cryogenic capsules containing the members of the downed spaceship.
A drone also arrives, which begins to eliminate the survivors for no apparent reason since they are humans and not aliens. However, Jack manages to save a girl, Julia Rusakova, who looks identical to the woman that often fills his visions, and despite Victoria’s disapproval, decides to shelter her in his protected home.
The next morning, Jack and Julia go down to the surface to find the black box of the crashed spacecraft. Once they arrive at the wreck, however, they are captured by the Scavengers and taken to an underground base. Jack discovers with dismay that the aliens are actually surviving humans, led by the elderly Marine Malcolm Beech, who tells him how the entire story of the Scavengers is an invention and how Jack was originally an astronaut sent in 2017, sixty years earlier, to Titan to investigate the mysterious Tet. It was the Tet that caused the destruction of the Moon and the subsequent cataclysms that devastated the planet. Also, the story of the soil contaminated by radiation is false because humans never had time to use nuclear weapons, even though they were capable. Beech wants to launch a drone filled with energy cells against the Tet to destroy it, but the drones only respond to Jack’s voice commands. Suddenly, the human resistance base is attacked by a drone sent by Victoria, but the rebels manage to resist. Jack initially refuses to cooperate with Beech, and he lets him go with Julia, advising him to go to a radioactive area, where he will surely find answers to many questions.
Jack takes Julia to the ruins of the Empire State Building and the woman reveals to Jack that she was once his wife. Despite the shock, Jack finally finds the connection to all his visions and realizes that Beech has told him the truth. He also senses that the one with whom Julia arrived was a NASA spacecraft, orbiting around Earth. Upon returning to Jack’s residence, the two are greeted by a desperate Victoria who, noticing the complicity between the two and feeling betrayed, has informed Sally how Jack is no longer suitable for the mission. Sally activates a drone placed in the home with the intent to eliminate them, but it is Victoria who is killed. The two, having escaped from the hunt of three more drones sent by Sally, crash with the aircraft in a deserted area within a radioactive zone, where a stunned Jack finds himself face to face with an identical element to himself, but marked with the number 52 (Jack has identification number 49), landed nearby to repair a recently downed drone. Jack now understands that the contaminated areas are actually zones operated by his other clones, with whom he was not supposed to have contact. Jack confronts number 52, managing to take him out of the fight and tie him up, before putting Julia, who is injured in the fight, in a safe place and going to the clone’s home Tech 52 in search of medicine to treat Julia’s wound. Here he discovers that a clone of Victoria also exists, who, believing him to be her partner, does not obstruct him.
The two fugitives now return to the stronghold of the so-called Scavengers, which Jack now decides to help by modifying a drone that will carry out Beech’s plan.
At this point, Jack has all the elements to reconstruct the truth: the Tet is indeed an alien entity that, after destroying the Moon, cloned him and Victoria thousands of times, creating an army to win over the last surviving humans from the disasters caused by the Moon’s destruction; the Tet sent him and Victoria to Earth with the task of monitoring the hydro-drills, converting liquid water into fusion energy, in a process executed on all planets of other conquered systems that, like Earth, have water reserves. Jack tries to convince Victoria’s clone of what the truth is, but she prefers to stay on the tower and follow the Tet’s orders.
The rebels are meanwhile attacked again by other drones sent by Sally and, despite being able to bring them down, they irreparably lose the drone that Jack had tampered with, and Beech is mortally wounded. Jack then decides to enter the Tet with the aircraft, bringing Julia with him in the cryogenic capsule since Sally has expressed the intention to meet Julia to clone her, in order to create a “more efficient team.”
As he flies towards the Tet, Jack listens to the black box of Julia’s shipwreck: Victoria was his co-pilot on the mission approaching the Tet towards Titan. Near the alien object, Jack realizes that the Tet was about to capture the ship with a powerful tractor beam. Seeing the impossibility of disconnecting, Jack had separated the cryogenic capsule module from the ship so that they could return to Earth, but he did not realize that the module would remain in orbit for sixty years, until Beech sent the return signal.
Jack reaches the colossal alien structure and finally faces Sally, who appears as a sentient mechanical entity of tetrahedral shape, offering no explanation for her arrival in the solar system but proclaims herself a god for having restored Jack’s life. Jack reveals that he swapped the two cryogenic capsules and in Julia’s, who is pregnant and was frozen in another capsule, he placed Beech. The two then activate the nuclear bomb, made from energy cells, which was hidden inside Beech’s cryogenic capsule, destroying the Tet and causing the instantaneous deactivation of all drones.
Three years later, Julia lives peacefully in Jack’s paradise corner, raising their daughter. A group of survivors arrives, among whom Tech 52 can be seen, revealing how their previous meeting had awakened Julia’s memories, which he had been searching for since the day of the Tet’s destruction. Since he shares the same latent memory as Jack (Tech 49), he can now reunite with “his” family.
Directed by Joseph Kosinski
Starring Tom Cruise, Morgan Freeman, Olga Kurylenko, Andrea Riseborough, and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau
Source: WIKIPEDIA