Oblivion is a tough movie to review without spoiling, and I think it’s worth not spoiling because I don’t think it was widely watched and it wasn’t bad. It is a post apocalyptic sci-fi movie that has a little in common with the Matrix and a little in common with Independence Day. It has a some cool sci-fi stuff going on. Space travel, aliens, nuclear war, radiation, etc.

It suffers because it has too much going on. There are a ton of twists, and the twists are sort of fun and compelling but there are just so many! It’s like if Darth Vader is Luke’s father, Luke & Leia are sisters, Palpatine is Sidious, Natalie Portman is the queen, Yoda is Yoda, Jar Jar is a Sith Lord, and Kylo Ren is secretly a member of the Harlem Globetrotters were all in the same movie and instead of having 7 films of lore and character development setting it up you had 2 minutes of voiceover from Tom Cruise.

I like things about this movie. I like Rosamund Pike, and how she speaks in a vaguely southern accent, and how she wears all of her emotions right on her face. I like David Oyelowo’s stoic certainty. I like Werner Herzog even though it doesn’t seem like he can act. I like how there is very little music. I like how the movie tells us what people are doing and thinking, not by having them speak but by having the camera focus on what they are doing or how they are reacting to situations. The movie also contains one of the few great car chase / escape sequences I’ve seen. Jack Reacher is sparse and concise in a way that makes it stylish.

A young, naive blonde bombshell moves to L.A. to become a singer in the height of the hair metal era. She gets a job at a bar where people rock out constantly and she promptly falls in love with a dorky child who also wants to be singer. They are played by the only two actors in the movie who aren’t particularly famous and the only two who can sing.

Meanwhile a mayoral candidate and his wife plan to shut down the rock out bar because it’s dangerous and because people thinking rock & roll was dangerous was apparently still at thing in 1987.

Right now television is replacing film as the predominant medium for storytelling. There is so much variety, creativity and talent on television without the requirement that content must make hundreds of millions of dollars to be deemed successful. Networks measure success, and their audiences, by a variety of standards. Television has also overcome the restriction of content needing to fit into 30 or 60 minute time windows because stories can be told in many-episode segments. 

I’m guessing Knight and Day was created in response to the success of Mr. & Mrs. Smith which came out 5 years earlier and was actually watchable because Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie can both act.

A word I hear a lot about when critics analyze the success of movies that feature big name movie stars is “chemistry.” The idea is that film actors who share the trait of chemistry are engaging to watch on screen together. This mystical quality is incalculable outside of happenstance surrounding the personalities of people who act together. 

I’ve always been baffled by the immense hard-on America has for stories about World War II. I think it says more about our bloodthirstiness as a culture than anything else that we devour depictions of history’s bloodiest war for the sheer entertainment of experiencing the reality and emotion of death.

Valkyrie tells almost no actual history but uses the shorthand of America’s familiarity with Hitler and World War II to tell a story that could not be comprehendible in any other form. No establishment of character or setting is needed. The movie starts and ends as a tale about a plot within the German military to kill Hitler and seize Germany.

The production quality of Tropic Thunder is maniacal. It was maybe the best directed, best written, most beautifully photographed movie of 2008. It is a satire about Hollywood and an allegory about the Iraq War. Sure, it is a bit troubling that it is a big-budget Hollywood movie bemoaning the production process of big-budget Hollywood movies. It is a little offensive that Tom Cruise characterizes a rich, disgusting Hollywood producer who is also Jewish. But in about 7 minutes of screen time, Cruise knocks it out of the park.

I was dreading watching Lions for Lambs, because of the poster featuring Meryl Streep, Robert Redford, and Tom Cruise all looking intensely into the camera, and because of the IMDB plot summary about a teacher, a journalist, and a politician becoming entrenched in a political conspiracy. And because the opening frames of the movie, with Cruise and Redford pouring over statistics about the war on terror and an intense, drum-heavy minor score, made me roll my eyes in anticipation of a bunch of actors showing us all how the country should be run.

It’s weird, because my politics do line up with other liberal message movies like Game Change and Recount and Crash but I just don’t find those movies compelling. I don’t know if it’s that I don’t like to be preached to or that I feel that for a movie to be interesting it has to actually explore some controversy rather than assume it’s right about everything. But that’s what I assumed Lions for Lambs would be like.

I was wrong. Lions for Lambs is pretty good. It isn’t perfect, but it is thought provoking, nuanced, and fast-paced. It explores all-sides of a complicated issue. It applies 2007 current events in a way that gives the movie a shelf-life outside of our American 2007-era understanding of the war on terror. And it is one of Tom Cruise’s best performances.

The movie jumps between three scenes, each featuring two characters. One is an interview between journalist Meryl Streep and Senator Tom Cruise about a new US military strategy in Afghanistan. Another is a conversation between professor Robert Redford and student Andrew Garfield about said student’s willingness to participate in his studies. And the last features two injured US special forces troops waiting for rescue after being shot down over a mountain in Afghanistan. One of the soldiers is played by Michael Peña and the other is played by Derek Luke. This is an all-star cast and it’s kind of cool that there are two huge stars in the later stages of their careers and two stars in the early stages of their careers and then there’s Tom Cruise.

In the last review I wondered what a good way for an actor to age might be. It seems like there is a clear path for actresses because they are typically cast as sex symbols until they’re no longer beautiful and then they either get plastic surgery and fade into oblivion or they fade into oblivion in roles as elegant mothers (though Streep is an exception to that rule as she keeps getting starring roles which I guess is because she’s the best actress of all time). Men are a bit more complicated because Hollywood continues to need to cast them as masculine but they slowly lose sex appeal, so they either turn out as twisted gargoyles like Al Pacino or Sly Stallone or they start taking fewer roles as tortured anti-heroes like Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, and Redford.

Anyway, Cruise kind of dodges the aging star problem in this role because even though he’s starting to get old for a leading man, he’s young for a politician, and he’s cast as the villain in this one as an ambitious and charming Republican senator. I loved seeing his natural creepiness as a politician who doesn’t get redeemed or change as the movie progress – his character is greasy but brilliant. He’s Jerry Maguire at the beginning of Jerry Maguire. If that character never decided to change anything about his life, he’d be this guy.

The scene in Afghanistan is the movie’s weak point. Not because the performances are bad but because the actors aren’t given much to do besides groan and point their weapons at enemies they can’t see and the scene takes place entirely in the dark.

It’s clear that the movie is slanted and sympathizes with Streep as the intrepid and conscientious reporter, But it is quite fair. It acknowledges the media’s failure to cover our military accurately and clearly after 9/11 and we see that the situation is complex and difficult. The strategy proposed by Cruise’s character is flawed, but it is plausible, and it is something, and the problem is not that it exists but that it is not up for debate.

If the interview between Streep and Cruise is the conceit, and the scene in Afghanistan the result, then the conversation between Redford and Garfield is kind of a meta-commentary about progress and duty. What can a rich, smart, unmotivated kid really do? In the movie’s opinion: Try. Debate. Struggle. Fail. Don’t take it lying down.

I like Andrew Garfield but he’s still getting his sea legs in this movie and he seems a bit wooden, while Redford is a goddamn pro. It’s cool to see the ease with which he delivers his lines and makes me wish there was a movie where Cruise/Redford are more closely paired. Though on the other hand that’s a dangerous amount of charm for one movie. What is an appropriate way for a movie star to age? Here’s one example.

Anyway. This is a bit of an after school special. But in a good way. It’s under 90 minutes, it’s thought provoking, and it’s not the propaganda piece I expected. Neat.

Next: Tropic Thunder

Sometimes the best way to review a movie is to summarize it. Here’s a summary of Mission: Impossible III:

Ethan Hunt is aging but he is still the best fucking spy in the world. He’s in a committed, live-in relationship with a doctor and he’s excited but nervous to meet her family. She thinks he works for the department of transportation.

Well, it turns out that the IMF still calls on Ethan sometimes, to train new agents and also to go rescue the agents he’s trained when they get captured by intense international terrorists played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Ethan plans a complicated mission and succeeds in rescuing Keri Russell but she promptly dies because she has an explosive charge implanted in her brain.

Keri Russell sent Ethan a special encrypted message before she died indicating that she suspects the leadership at the IMF of being in cahoots with Phillip Seymour Hoffman, so he doesn’t tell them about his mission to capture Hoffman by infiltrating the Vatican, standing in as a decoy Hoffman while his apprentice agents kidnap the real guy, and blowing up an orange Lamborghini for some reason. But Hoffman escapes when an army of masked, uniformed men make a bunch of explosions on a bridge.

Because he overheard Ving Rhames mention Ethan’s first name, Hoffman is able to immediately find Ethan’s wife and kidnap her, demanding that Ethan retrieve the mysterious super weapon he’s after to pay for her release. So Ethan finds the mysterious super weapon and then gets kidnapped by Hoffman himself. Luckily his wife who is suddenly surprisingly proficient with a pistol rescues Ethan from several armed terrorists and defuses the explosive charge in Ethan’s head with a makeshift defibrillator. Meanwhile the IMF leadership guy who was working with the terrorists the whole time gets away, I guess. The end.

Philip Seymour Hoffman is terrifying in this movie which plays into a major fear existent in the American public at the time of this film’s release: terrorists don’t have personalities, causes, or morals, they just want to wreak havoc. I’m not sure if this has ever been true but it makes for a compelling villain who isn’t bothered by anything and who is completely unrelenting. I guess if he is motivated by anything it is money since he wants to sell the mysterious super weapon that is never fully explained but even that isn’t explored by the plot.

He is purely evil, which I think is what fascinated JJ Abrams by this storyline: the franchise is called Mission: Impossible for god’s sake and he wanted to present his audience with an Impossible villain. I suppose you could interpret something from the fact that the unflinching, meticulous villain is motivated solely by coin but I’ll leave that to the English majors. Oh wait I am an English major.

Unfortunately, outside of the late PSH the movie is a mess. There are 3 or 4 of the franchise’s signature heist sequences but none of them are as grandiose or as well executed as the ones in the first two films, and the plot is a constant moving target where the surprises just further confuse your understanding. There are also a ton of characters with their own personal stories which in theory sounds interesting but in practice makes the movie feel super muddled and unfocused. Simon Pegg, Jonathan Rhys Myers, Lawrence Fishburne and even Aaron Paul play significant roles but they are all more bewildering than captivating.

Hey, you know who else is in this movie? Tom Cruise! Cruise’s influence has always been noticeable in the M:I franchise but I think this is the film where it started being more about Cruise than the directors (as mentioned in previous reviews, the first movie was a very stylized noir by Brian DePalma, and the second one was heavily influenced by action-master John Woo). The central conflict in M:I III, as well as its style and character development, are all based around the idea of Cruise as a loving, family figure, to his wife, to his protege Keri Russell, and to the other agents on his team. You can only believe that Simon Pegg would betray orders from his supervisors to help Cruise’s character, or that the newly minted Mrs. hunt would trust his frequent last minute “business trips” to important DOT expos, if he was a loving, loyal companion to everyone close to him.

I don’t particularly mind that this seems to run a bit contrary to the Ethan Hunt of the first two films because I feel that each M:I movie kind of stands on its own, sort of like the pre-Daniel Craig Bond movies – they are set in the same universe and have similar characters but the storyline and circumstances are different each time and the characters can be augmented in service of the plot. The thing that I mind is that the movie isn’t very good, and I wonder if Ethan had remained a maverick with a raw, obsessive commitment to the Mission firstly and solely, if this plot line, with the Hoffman character, could have worked.

Instead, this seems like another movie in service of Cruise’s early-aughts obsession with portraying himself as a human being. You can see ties to the Oprah interview, and War of the Worlds, and Minority Report.

This raises an interesting question though: what is the appropriate way for a movie star to age?

Next: Lions for Lambs