How A 2010s Sci-Fi Stunner Was Kneecapped By Tom Cruise Success

By Joshua Tyler & Chris Snellgrove | Published 1 day ago

There are plenty of post-apocalyptic movies out there, but most of them share the same problem: by the end, you feel just as hopelessly miserable as the characters onscreen. Far too many directors think the key to this genre is simply to give us scene after scene of bleak despair.

What audiences really want is a movie that uses a fictional future apocalypse as a lens to help us understand our present day.  In 2013, one sci-fi movie tried to do exactly that, and it enlisted the biggest movie star in Hollywood history to make it happen. 

It was directed by a man who is currently the hottest filmmaker in Hollywood, responsible for much of two of the industry’s most recent, big-money hits. The elements were there to make this an all-time great sci-fi movie, and nothing like that happened at all.

This is why Oblivion failed.

A Tom Cruise Movie Starring Tom Cruise

Tom Cruise stars in Oblivion as Jack Harper, a technician repairman of drones on Earth who begins to question his mission when he encounters a spaceship crash that throws his world upside down. It’s 2077, and Earth has been devastated by a war with an alien enemy known as the Scavs. Humanity won the war, but the planet was left mostly uninhabitable. Most survivors have relocated to Saturn’s moon Titan, while Jack Harper and his communications partner Victoria, played by Andrea Riseborough, remain stationed on Earth to maintain the drones protecting massive machines that harvest the planet’s remaining resources.

Jack’s memory has been wiped for security reasons, but he is troubled by recurring dreams of a woman he does not know. While investigating a crashed spacecraft, Jack discovers that the woman from his dreams is Julia, played by Olga Kurylenko, an astronaut who has been in suspended animation since before the war. Her arrival causes Jack to question everything he has been told about the Scavs, the mission, and his own identity.

When he made Oblivion, director Joseph Kosinski was coming off the modest success of Tron: Legacy, a movie that nearly everyone agreed worked only because of his visionary directing. He used the goodwill he’d built up there to get funding for a movie based on a concept he’d written out as a pseudo-graphic novel, called Oblivion. 

The work was a preview/pitch booklet with text and concept art. Kosinski had it handed out to attendees at the San Diego Comic-Con. That booklet ended up in the hands of Tom Cruise and got his attention. Cruise called Kosinski, and with Tom Cruise on board, getting funding became easy. 

Karl Gajdusek developed that pitch into a screenplay for the big screen, and then Michael Arndt was tasked with revising some of Kosinski’s and Gajdusek’s writing, using the pseudonym of “Michael deBruyn” as his writing credit for the film. William Monahan also got involved at some point, making his own changes to the script. If you’ve followed along with our Why It Failed series before, you should know that this much writing and rewriting is already a bad sign.

Disney stepped up to make the movie, inspired by Kosinski’s Tron: Legacy success, but then bailed when they wanted something closer to a PG version, even though the material worked better as a harder PG-13 post-apocalyptic action film. Universal, which had already been interested, ended up taking it on.

Olga Kurylenko came in alongside Jessica Chastain, Olivia Wilde, and Noomi Rapace to read for the role of Jack’s wife and crew member Julia. Chastain originally won the part and was contracted to start production until she was cast in 2012’s Zero Dark Thirty about the mission to capture and kill Osama bin Laden. Cruise let her out of her contract to do the historically important film, and Kurylenko was cast as Julia in place of Chastain.

The production’s biggest creative decision was that Kosinski did not want the movie to look like a standard green-screen sci-fi film. Coming off Tron: Legacy, he wanted Oblivion to feel more physical, more photographic, and more daylight-driven. He said the visual idea was “beauty in the desolation,” influenced by sci-fi artists Peter Elson and Chris Foss, whose work showed colorful daylight futures rather than only grim wastelands. 

Oblivion’s most famous and successful production trick was the Sky Tower. Instead of surrounding the movie’s glass house set with green screen, Kosinski built the set with real glass and surrounded it with a massive 270-degree projected sky. Pixomondo filmed sky footage from Haleakalā in Hawaii, then projected that imagery around the Baton Rouge set. The projection was not just background; it became the main light source for the actors and reflective surfaces. 

Because of that, Oblivion looks fantastic. Watching Cruise’s drone repairman blast through the wrecked-up wasteland of a post-alien-invasion New York City on a futuristic dirt bike, past the strewn carcasses of container ships and submarines, is spectacular. When he floats through the ruined world in his bubble ship, the special effects are crisp and clean and blend seamlessly with the frame. They’re so good you don’t notice them. 

The entire film reminds you of those IMAX movies you saw as a kid, where a helicopter-mounted camera sweeps around the rim of an active volcano or dives into the Grand Canyon. It’s amazing. 

Why Oblivion Failed

Oblivion looks like a huge hit. It wasn’t. 

It opened at number one in North America, then faded fast, finishing with about $89 million domestic and $286 million worldwide. That made it respectable, especially overseas, where Cruise still had serious drawing power. But respectable was the ceiling. 

Oblivion earned enough to avoid embarrassment, but not enough to be remembered. The movie was forgotten almost the second it left theaters.

Critics were mixed. Reviewers kept circling around the same complaint: Oblivion looked like a major event, but underneath all that polished design it felt assembled from better science fiction movies.

I’m not sure that’s fair. The big twists in the plot may have been done before, but they’re executed in a totally unique way. Oblivion has interesting ideas, interesting ideas worth exploring. 

In the end, that was not enough. Oblivion was caught in the worst possible middle ground. It was too expensive and polished to feel like a scrappy original discovery, but too familiar to feel like the next great science fiction event. 

The trailers sold mystery, Tom Cruise, and beautiful ruined-Earth imagery, but they never gave audiences a simple emotional hook beyond “Tom Cruise in another futuristic movie.”  That mattered because Oblivion arrived only eight years after War of the Worlds and two years after Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, with Cruise still viewed by many casual moviegoers more as a brand than a character actor. 

The movie also arrived when people were kind of burnt out on last man on Earth stories. They’d already seen WALL-E, Moon, The Matrix, and others. 

Oblivion was good-looking, competent, and easy to admire, but it did not give people enough reason to insist everyone else see it.

Overshadowed By Edge Of Tomorrow

A year later, Tom Cruise would release another mid-level, ambitious sci-fi movie called Edge of Tomorrow. Unlike Oblivion, that film gained massive critical acclaim and immediate cult status. 

Edge of Tomorrow love was, and is, so strong that it completely overshadowed people’s memory of Oblivion, and now, while everyone still talks about Edge of Tomorrow, it’s as if Oblivion never existed. That’s a shame, because Oblivion was a good, big-screen experience. The look of the movie is like nothing else you’ve ever seen, and while it’s still worth watching at home on television, there was something special about the way it looked, projected on a screen in a darkened theater.

Oblivion is a worthwhile sci-fi movie. If it were released today, it might get the credit it deserved, but back then, when moviegoers didn’t know how good they had it, Oblivion was easy to relegate to, well, oblivion.