Okay, just catching up here on a few movies I’ve recently seen.
This movie is so irrational, I couldn’t wrap my head around it enough after seeing it last week to write anything down, but I’ll try again now.
Tom Cruise is Jack Harper, an astronaut on Earth’s “mop up” crew. You see, there was this invasion and the bad guys stole the Moon–oh no, wait, that was in Despicable Me. Bad guys broke the Moon (it’s very pretty up there looking all Milky Way-scattered), so the tides went wild, the tsunamis raged, everything from the Coasts to Kansas was washed away, and the Empire State Building is buried up to its scenic overlook in sand.
Of course, all that water didn’t wash away a little King Kong toy, but never mind that. What’s an apocalyptic movie without the Empire State Building, King Kong imagery, and Lady Liberty’s torch?
Harper’s job is to zoom around in his very very cool airship and look for “scavs.” Scavs are scavengers or left-over bad guys, because we won the war, but lost the planet, and some scavs are still here. All the humans have moved to Titan, and that was accomplished with 2017 technology. Or 2077 technology, because, so we’re told, sixty years have passed since the invasion, and during that time we were able to up our technology from “We don’t even have a Shuttle” to “Let’s all move to Titan!” and this while Florida and the Vehicle Assembly Building are washed away by the Atlantic overflow, Houston is washed away from the Gulf overflow and JPL and whatever-else we’ve got here in Cali are sucked out into Mother Pacifica. Those brainiacs in Omaha must be the hope of the world.
In addition to moving the entire population of Earth to Titan, everyone’s memory was mandatorily “wiped” five years ago. That’s why he remembers so much. Like, he knows all about the 2017 Super Bowl, even though he’s not old enough to remember it, but has read about it and seen enough replayed NFL games on Titan to know what a Hail Mary is and how the crowd went wild. They must have taken YouTube with them, and hang the NFL copyright.
Turns out so many things we think are going on aren’t going on. In fact, the whole movie is about finding out that what you know isn’t true.
Turns out Harper’s not Harper, the girl he works with isn’t herself either, the big bad Spaceship “Tet” is not what we are told, and the giant machines sucking our water for energy (see Battleship) are doing so for…why? I don’t remember.
Speaking of derivations, there are little Eve-like bots who go around blasting things just like Eve does in Wall-E, scanner and all. And there’s a Hal controlling everything too, but that’s at the end when you’re groaning at the piled-on nonsense.
Suddenly, Harper stumbles upon a bunch of humans led by none other than Morgan Freeman (who else?) who sends Harper off on a journey to find himself. He does, and then all sorts of exciting things happen, but none of them make any sense.
Realizing he’s been treated like nothing but a robot all this time by the powers-that-be, Harper goes on a journey that can only end one way, but before he goes, he sends a girl to an oasis of sorts all by herself with no defenses and no way to support herself. More silliness and baby clothes out of nowhere. I can’t go on.
The plot is lame, the writing is lame, the oft-repeated hark back to the “ashes of his fathers and the temple of his gods” is badly used here. Meaning, I’ve shed tears over that passage when it’s been used properly. Here, it’s just overused, as if the writer wanted to say, “Looky, I’m cultured. Really I am!”
Based on a graphic novel. No kidding.