movie review week 6

 Oblivion

In 2077, Earth has been ravaged from war with an extraterrestrial invader sixty years prior. The Moon was destroyed, causing earthquakes and tsunamis, while humans allegedly used nuclear weapons for a costly victory. Humanity is now relocating to Saturn's moon Titan via the "Tet", a large tetrahedron-shaped space station. On Earth, Tech 49 Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) and his partner and lover Victoria "Vika" Olsen (Andrea Riseborough) are among the few humans left on Earth. Stationed at Tower 49 in the formernortheastern United States, they are instructed by mission controller Sally (Melissa Leo) to protect the gigantic offshore fusion energy generators, which are generating power for the colonists on Titan, from attacks by Scavs, a small force of marauding aliens who remained on Earth. The generators are protected by both Drones and Jack's regular reconnaissance from his ship. Despite having had a memory wipe, Jack experiences visions of being on the observation deck of the Empire State Building with an unknown woman before the war. When not on patrol, Jack secretly spends time at a small lake-side house he has built.

Jack detects a Scav beacon signal emitted from the Empire State Building that is sending coordinates on Earth. Perplexed, he terminates the signal, only to witness a pre-invasion spacecraft, the Odyssey, fall to the earlier specified coordinates. Investigating the wreckage, Jack finds several working stasis chambers, including one containing Julia (Olga Kurylenko), the woman from his visions. A drone arrives at the crash site and starts shooting at the stasis chambers, killing the humans inside. Jack saves Julia and brings her back to Tower 49, where he revives her and is surprised that she knows his name, though Vika distrusts her. The next day Jack and Julia return to the wreckage of the Odyssey to retrieve its flight recorder. The Scavs arrive and capture Jack and Julia, secure the flight recorder, and take them to their base at Raven Rock Mountain Complex. The Scavs are not aliens but human survivors, led by Malcolm Beech (Morgan Freeman). Beech wants Jack's help to destroy the Tet by reprogramming a captured drone to take unstable fuel cells to the Tet, where they will explode. He says everything that Jack knows is a lie, but Jack disbelieves him; Beech releases them, saying the truth can be found in one of the forbidden radiation zones.

En route back to Tower 49, Jack and Julia go to the Empire State Building, Julia tells Jack that she was his wife. Their team, which included Vika, was heading towards Titan when they encountered the Tet, an alien ship, and was diverted to investigate it. Since she was in stasis, she doesn't know what happened after they left. They fly back to Tower 49 but Vika, monitoring their movements, refuses entry and reports to Sally that she and Jack are now an ineffective team. Sally activates a disabled drone hidden inside the tower that kills Vika but is destroyed by Julia. Jack and Julia escape with the other drones in pursuit. Jack's ship is totally damaged and they jettison in the forbidden zone, which turns out to lack the warned-of radioactivity. They encounter Tech 52 Jack, an exact clone of Jack, and during a scuffle Julia is shot. Seeing Julia, Tech 52 Jack falters and experiences the same visions Tech 49 Jack experienced. After incapacitating and tying up Jack 52, Tech 49 Jack flies to Tower 52, finding a Vika clone there. He obtains medical supplies and returns to treat a wounded Julia.

After an evening at the lake-house, the two return to the Scavs. Beech reveals that the Tet is the hostile alien force, mining the Earth's resources while eliminating humanity. After the Tet destroyed the Moon, it sent an army of Jack clones to invade Earth to kill humans, and nukes were launched to defend. Afterwards, Jack and Vika clones were tasked to maintain the drones that monitor and protect the generators from human survivors.

"Sally" sends drones to breach the complex, which Jack helps the others defend. Beech is gravely injured and the captured drone is damaged beyond repair. The humans try to regroup but fear an imminent attack. With Julia's consent, Jack communicates with the Tet via Sally, agreeing to turn over Julia to her. After saying 'goodbye' and placing Julia in a stasis chamber, Jack flies to the Tet while listening to the Odyssey '​s flight recorder and learning the fate of its commander, astronaut Jack Harper: he, Vika and Julia were crew members aboard the Odyssey, which was originally an exploration mission to Titan. The mission was re-routed by the real Sally at mission control to investigate the Tet, then near Saturn's orbit and therefore close to the original trajectory. Originally appearing inactive, the Tet began to pull the spacecraft towards it. Sensing danger, Jack jettisons the sleep module, an emergency escape pod programmed to orbit Earth, to save the crew members in stasis. Jack and Vika are captured by unseen aliens.

While entering the Tet, escorted by two drones, Jack glides past thousands of pods containing Jack and Vika clones. Upon final interrogation, he tells a doubting "Sally" he believes Julia would make a better partner for him and is granted access into the Tet's main control center. Now deep inside the Tet, Jack unloads and opens the sleep chamber which surprisingly contains Beech and a fuel cell bomb. They trigger the bomb, destroying the Tet and shutting down the attacking drones before they reach the human base. On Earth, Julia awakens from the stasis chamber at the lake-house in time to see the Tet destroyed. Three years later, Julia and her young daughter are living in the lake-house. Members of the human resistance arrive across the lake from the house and Jack Harper 52 emerges from the crowd smiling at Julia.

Oblivion. A mind blowing story that shows us that we are not always right, even though we think we are at the first attempt. The story line gave a big impact to me as a human being. If Tet really exist in this world, I'm pretty sure I'm not capable to fight them like the Scavengers did, so I need to dig more about this universe, keep doing research and I can defeat Tet. The ending of this story is really a shock plot twist as I expected Jack Harper Tower 44 to come back instead of Jack Harper Tower 52. Yeah, the same face, the same body and exactly the same soul but if I were Julia, the love will never be the same.