Oblivion Movie Review

Oblivion

                                         

Oblivion is a science fiction action thriller movie released in 2013. The release date of this movie is near to Will Smith's sci-fi movie After Earth. This movie is based on Joseph Kosinski's unpublished graphic novel of the same name. Oblivion is written by Joseph Kosinski, Michael Arndt and Karl Gajdusek and directed by Joseph Kosinski. This movie has a very small set of characters, which is played by Tom Cruise, Morgan Freeman, Olga Kurylenko, Andrea Riseborough, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Melissa Leo.

Oblivion tells the story of future, where a drone technician finds a lady whom he has dreamt several times, in a crashed spaceship. Then the whole world, as he knows it, starts to change.

Tom Cruise and Olga Kurylenko in Oblivion

Plot:

This is a story of the year 2077. Around 60 years ago, some aliens (called Scavengers, or scavs) has attacked earth. They have started the attack by destroying the moon, creating environmental imbalance in planet earth. Then they invaded earth. To stop them, the world leaders have used nuclear bombs, which made the earth uninhabitable even for human. Mankind has moved to Titan, one of Saturn’s moons.

Now human have put several machines which generate power from the seawater. Scavs are still there in the earth, so human are using drones to protect the machines. There is also a space station named Tet near the earth, which is used as the control station of the whole program.

Jack is one of the very few people living in the earth. He is a drone technician. His job is to take care of the drones and repair them when needed. He lives in a secure high tech beautiful home with his partner and lover Victoria, who coordinates and navigates Jack’s mission according to the orders from the Tet. It’s been 5 years since Jack had a mandatory memory swipe, but regularly he dreams of another lady with him in a busy city.

Jack’s days pass by doing his job, while frequently he has to fight with scavs. In one situation, when he was face to face with a group of scavs, he finds that the scavs are no trying to kill him, but trying to catch him. He has a secret place, where there is still some trees left and there he has a cabin by a lake, where he goes secretly to relax.

One day, Jack and Victoria find a strange signal coming from a tower. Jack there place and before disabling it, he finds that, the signal is broadcasting coordinates of a location. Later on that day, Jack finds a crashed spaceship there with the crews in capsules. To Jack’s amazement, a drone comes there and starts killing them, instead of saving them. In one capsule, Jack finds the girl from his dream and saves her from the drones by risking his life. He brings her to his home.

As soon as she wakes up, she seems to recognize Jack. She tells her name is Julia and her spaceship was a mission by NASA. She then wants to recover the flight recorder from her ship, so Jack takes her to the crash site. There they are attacked by the scavs and the scavs take them to their hiding place.

After going there, Jack finds that the scavs are nothing but human. They ask Jack’s help to plant a bomb in the Tet. Jack refuses and then the scav leader lets him go free and suggests him to visit the restricted ‘radiation zone’ where, according to Jack’s instructions, he will burn if he enters.

Jack takes Julia to some place and asks her identity. Then Julia reveals that she is Jack’s wife. Jack then remembers some of his memories with Julia. Victoria sees the scene with her camera, and when Jack and Julia returns home, Victoria refuses to open the door. She also reports to the Tet that they are no more an effective team.

Suddenly, a drone gets activated and kills Victoria. It then tries to kill Jack, but Julia saves him. Then Jack and Julia get chased by some more drones and finally crash in the radiation zone. At the radiation zone, Jack finds a clone of himself and both of the clones start to fight. In their fight, Julia gets injured. So find treatment for her, Jack finds a home identical to his home in another zone, with the clone of Victoria as well.

To find answers, Jack and Julia go to the scav leader again. Here Jack tries to find the facts about the Tet, the scavs, his own past, Julia’s true identity and the mystery of the clones.

My reviews about the movie Oblivion:

I liked Oblivion very much, not for the plot, but for the beautiful cinematography and special effects.

The plot of Oblivion is very simple and predictable. There is no doubt that the plot is good, but we have seen a lot of movies with kind of similar plots, like I’Robot or the Eagle Eye. In a movie with Tom Cruise in it, we obviously expect something remarkable. There were a lot of hints throughout the movie Oblivion, so it became predictable that who the main villain was.

What made the Oblivion special was the beautiful screenplay, cinematography and the special effects. The use of special effects was extra-ordinary, even comparing with other high rated science fiction movies. The set design, lighting and camera works were perfect matches with the context of this movie.

Oblivion has a remarkably small set of characters but each of them has performed perfectly. I don’t need to write anything about Tom Cruise or Morgan Freeman, but everyone else did very well. The make ups and the dialogues were also extremely good. But this movie has very small amount of action sequences. More action sequences could make Oblivion more enjoyable.

Another downside of Oblivion is, a lot of screen time was given only to show Tom Cruise alone, specially on the first half. It was bearable only because it was extremely handsome Tom Cruise. With any other actor, it would look boring.

Although there is a small nudity at the beginning, but I still think it safe to watch Oblivion with kids.

So, finally, Oblivion is good movie, where everything, except the plot, were extra-ordinary. My time was well spent watching this movie and I’ll definitely recommend Oblivion to all movie lovers.

Did you like Oblivion? What do you think about its plot? Share with others in the comments.

To know more about it:

IMDB link: Oblivion on IMDB

Wikipedia link: Oblivion on Wiki 

To watch this movie on Amazon, you can find the best deal on it here: Oblivion Movie

The Amazing Spider Man Movie Review

The Amazing Spider Man 
                                                                      

The Amazing Spider-Man is an American superhero film (like Captain America: The Winter Soldier) released in 2012. As we all know, this movie is based on the famous Marvel Comics character “Spider-Man”.  The Amazing Spider Man is the fourth movie of this Spider -Man series, but after the third, this one starts again from the very beginning of the original story, thus serving as a reboot. This movie is written by James Vanderbilt, Alvin Sargent and Steve Kloves, directed by Marc Webb and starred by Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Rhys Ifans, Denis Leary, Campbell Scott, Irrfan Khan, Martin Sheen and Sally Field. This movie is released also in 3D.  

In The Amazing Spider-Man, we see how Peter Parker becomes the Spider Man, his struggles before and after his transformation and how he faces the villain, Lizard Man.

A scene from the movie The Amazing Spider Man

Plot:

The plot of The Amazing Spider-Man starts when Peter Parker was a kid. One night, in a hurry, Peter’s father takes Peter to Uncle Ben and Aunt May’s house and leaves him there taking Peter’s mother with him. They never returned. Their fate was not shown at that time of the movie.

Peter grew up to a teenager. In his school, he was regularly bullied by some other teens. He always carried a camera with him as he was fond of photography. But one day, some bullies beat him and break his camera when he refuses to take photos of those boys bullying another student. This incident also helps him to earn respect from beautiful Gwen.

One day Peter accidentally discovers his father’s secret documents. From his uncle Ben, he learns that his father was working with Dr. Curt Connors of Oscorp and then we see how his parents died. To learn more, Peter goes to Oscorp and enters there taking the identity of an intern. Then he sees Gwen from his school is taking the interns to a tour in Oscorp and he mixes with that team. Soon, with his brilliance, he gets noticed by Dr. Curt Connors, who, at that time, is working on cross species genetic exchange to cure the human from different disease. Dr. Connors' target is to cure the head of Oscorp and also to get his arm back.

Peter gets detached from the intern group and sneaks into a special lab, where he gets bitten by some exceptional type of spiders. His suspicious activities get caught by Gwen and she throws him away from the group. While returning home, he starts to feel his extraordinary abilities.

Soon Peter learns to control and use his new abilities and teaches the bullies at his school a lesson. Peter also meets Dr. Connors in his house and gives him some clue (which he has found from his father’s research) to complete his unfinished research. Peter gives Dr. Connors his identity and starts to help him with his research, which finally brings the success to regenerate an arm of a mouse. But after returning, Peter gets scolded by his uncle Ben for forgetting his responsibility. Angrily, Peter leaves the house and his uncle follows to search for him. In a store, he meets a thief who helps him, but accidentally kills uncle Ben. Peter finds the body of his uncle. Peter also realizes that it was him, who saw the thief stealing and had let him go. Later on, police gave him some clues about that thief.

Peter starts to beat up criminals to find that thief. From a painting on a gym’s wall, he gets inspired to make a costume. He makes that costume and also creates some kind of machine to shoot web from his wrist.

In the meantime, Dr. Connors’ boss pressures him to apply his newly found serum on human. When Dr. Connors rejects, his boss threatens him that he will shut down the whole project and also says, Peter’s father also didn’t agree to test his medicine on human. Out of desperation, Dr. Connors applies the serum on himself and turns into a big human-lizard.

Peter goes to Gwen’s house to attend her invitation and finds that, Gwen’s father is the police chief, who is looking for spider-man. They both had a little argument on the dinner table. After the dinner, Peter reveals his identity (as spider-man) to Gwen and they kiss. Then he hears police siren and Gwen’s dad rushes to a bridge where the lizard-man attacks. Peter also rushes there and saves some people.

On the next few days, Peter does some research and finds a possible hiding place of the lizard-man in the sewer. He then fights the lizard, but loses and escapes from there. Peter tells the police chief about the identity of the lizard-man, but he doesn’t trust him completely. The lizard man (Dr. Connors) learns Spider-Man’s identity from his camera and attacks his school to stop him, but Spider-Man again saves the students.  Later, he finds the plan of the lizard-man, that is, to use a special machine of Oscorp to convert all the people of the city to a stronger version of human, i.e., lizard-man.

The next part of the movie is about the plan of the lizard-man and the attempts of the spider-man to stop him.

My Review about The Amazing Spider-Man:

First of all, I liked The Amazing Spider-Man. Although I didn’t find it mind-blowing or extra-ordinary amazing, but I still liked it.

The plot of The Amazing Spider-Man is simple and pretty predictable. Almost all of us know the story of Spider-Man, like what happened to his uncle, how he got transformed etc, and this movie gives no surprise. The ending is also very predictable.

The dialogues are okay, not bad or nothing special. I didn’t like the acting of Andrew Garfield in The Amazing Spider-Man. I mean, his acting was not bad at all, but to me, he seemed too smart to be a kid who is regularly being bullied by his classmates. Here I missed Tobey Maguire, who’s innocent (and sometimes, confused) face and beautiful acting matched perfectly with the character he was playing in Spider-Man (part 1). The acting of all other characters of The Amazing Spider-Man were also good, but again I missed beautiful Kirsten Dunst. I’m not complaining about the artists here, I just missed the old ones.

The make-ups are good, except for the lizard-man. To me, it looked funny, not the image of a scary villain. Here in The Amazing Spider-Man the villain is not evil, his intentions were not bad, but harmful and wrong. He himself is a tragic hero.

The special effects are very good in The Amazing Spider-Man. Specially, the continuous shot in the action scene in the school where the Spider-Man was running over the lizard all around it trying to put it in nets looked awesome. All other flying and action scenes also looked beautiful.

At the last parts of the The Amazing Spider-Man, I was really hoping to see some more lizards after the lizard -man used gas on some police, but there was nothing like that. I think it could be a good addition to the movie.

To all Spider-Man fans, The Amazing Spider-Man should come as a big relief after the last part (part 3) of the previous Spider-Man series, the series which started with an amazing movie but kept getting worse at each sequel.

If you think after watching pervious three movies, there is nothing new to watch in The Amazing Spider-Man, you’ll make a wrong guess. There are a lot of differences in this movie with the previous one. For example, The Amazing Spider-Man, Spider-Man doesn’t enjoy public fame like the previous one, here he doesn’t have a photo-journalism career, here webs doesn’t come out of his hands, he makes an electronics device for that and here he hunts criminals for his personal vendetta, not to help people. In this movie, most of the Spider-Man’s moves are also different.

In my judgment, between Spider-Man (part one) and The Amazing Spider-Man, I’ll keep Spider-Man (part 1) on top. But The Amazing Spider-Man has a great potential and I’m looking forward to enjoy The Amazing Spider-Man 2.

Whatever, The Amazing Spider-Man is still a nice movie. An IMDB rating of 7.1 supports it. By watching this movie, I felt my time nicely spent. If you are a Spider-Man fan or a superhero movie fan, I’d recommend The Amazing Spider-Man to you.

How do you feel about this movie? Feel free to write in the comments.

For those who are interested:

IMDB Link: The Amazing Spider-Man IMDB

Wikipedia Link: The Amazing Spider-Man Wiki

To buy or rent this movie from Amazon, you can find the best deal on it here:  The Amazing Spider-Man Movie

Lockout Movie Review

Lockout

                                                   

Lockout is a science fiction action movie released in 2012. It is directed by James Mather and Stephen St. Leger, and written by Mather, St. Leger, and Luc Besson. The major characters of this movie is played by Guy Pearce, Maggie Grace, Vincent Regan, Joseph Gilgun, Lennie James, and Peter Stormare.  Don’t confuse this movie with the crime thriller ‘The Lookout’ of 2007.

The movie Lockout is about a man who is falsely alleged for a murder and then sent to a high security prison in the space, where the prisoners have become free and has taken control of the whole facility. The man's mission is to save the President's daughter.  

Guy Pearce and Maggie Grace in a scene of the movie Lookout

Plot:

Lockout tells a story of 2079. A man (maybe a spy) named Snow gets wrongly accused by secret service for killing another secret service agent and for trading confidential data. He is shown evidence that he has killed the agent, but he denies it. He is then sent to jail. But before he gets arrested, he manages to slip a briefcase (which was supposed to have the important data) to his friend, who hides it in a locker.

In the meantime, the daughter of U.S.A. president Emilie goes to visit a prison in space, referred as MS1 (for Maximum Security). She interviews a prisoner (Hydell) but during the interview, Hydell brakes free from the chains and then he frees all the prisoners in that jail. The prisoners start a riot and kill most of the security guards and officers of the prison, led by Hydell’s elder bother. They just keep some (including Emillie) alive as a bait and takes control of the whole prison.

Secret service gets informed about this situation and knows about the condition of the President’s daughter. They convinces Snow to go to a rescue mission to MS1 to bring Emilie alive out of there. Snow agrees to go there knowing his friend was in that prison.

At MS1, Emilie manages to run from the hold-up and hides in a room with her bodyguard. But as oxygen gets almost finished in that room, her bodyguard commits suicide to give her a few more minutes. After she becomes unconscious, Snow brakes in that room and takes Emilie out before the prisoners enter the room by cutting the doors.

Snow then takes Emily to a hidden place and helps her to disguise. Then they starts to look for his friend, but only to find him gone insane. Snow cannot learn anything from him about the briefcase’s location.

The next part of the movie is about Snow’s rescue mission, about his fight to get out of that prison alive, about his getting out of the things he’s accused for.

My review about the movie Lockout:

First of all, I’d say, I liked the movie Lockout.

Lockout is a pretty regular science fiction action movie which is not very rare, but this one is well made and well directed.

One interesting thing about Lockout is Guy Pearce’s dialogues. They are hilarious! Its something like the famous ‘Men in Black’ movie series, which is a serious movie itself, but the hero’s dialogues will make you laugh every now and then. Just like that, there is no comedy scene in the whole movie Lockout and Snow is a pretty badass action hero, but his dialogues are massively humorous. Although by reading this review, you may think the funny dialogues may not properly fit with a serious crime movie, but in this one, the dialogues are enjoyable and have not harmed the Lockout’s seriousness, not even a bit.

The acting of the major characters are okay in Lockout , but I won't say perfect. In a movie like this, there were opportunities and they could be better. Same goes for the make up.

The special effects are also good. There is no lack or no over-do of special effects in Lockout. 

I think the plot is the only thing which has kept Lockout away from being perfect. I mean, the plot is good, but there are a few plot-holes or weakness in this movie which has harmed the solidness of the plot. For example, the security system at the prison (MS1) seemed unrealistic. How come such a high priority prison did not have any proper isolation for the prisoners planned for a case like this? The prisoners could break free and could take control of the whole situation very easily in Lockout (for example, we saw a very good illustration of kind of similar scenario in the movie “Conair”). Someone wanted to use sleeping gas on the whole premise, but failed as the rebel leader killed him. How come there was no option to that from the control room? Snow’s identity was not shown in this movie. He could be a criminal, a spy or a secret service agent, but none of them was explained. The way Snow was plotted seemed very weak. Why the right person was on the right place on the right time is also not shown in Lockout. We also didn’t get to see how the president was put back to his post after being pulled from it.

But don’t let this confuse you, as I said, even with this weakness, the plot of Lockout is good. For the plotholes, screenplay can be blamed, but the direction was good.

Although there is no nudity in Lookout, but for violence and language this one is not a good choice for children.

So, overall, the movie Lockout  is good, if not excellent. I’d recommend it to the action movie lover. According to my guess, you may not love it, but should like it.

What do you think of the movie Lockout? Let us know in the comments.

To know more:

IMDB link: Lockout (2012)

Wikipedia link: Lockout (2012) wiki

To buy or rent this movie from Amazon or to watch online, click here: Lockout Movie