OBLIVION THE MOVIE: ALL THINGS SCI FI TO ALL PEOPLE

If you enjoy science fiction movies you will probably enjoy the Tom Cruise movie Oblivion. And I do mean sci fi movies, plural, because this one movie is actually a lot of sci fi movies ... all rolled into one. It tries to be all things sci fi movies to all people and we all know that when you try to please everyone, you mostly succeed at not pissing off anyone.

If you like post apocalypse movies (and I do, I always think that start of a good story is the destruction of humanity) Oblivion has you covered. The film starts several years after humanity has been invaded by aliens we call the Scavs, our war with them destroys most of the planet, the Scavs blow up the moon creating huge earthquakes and tsunamis that tear the earth apart and thanks to the bombs we unleash, irradiate the rest of the planet. As Cruise's character states, we win the war but lose the earth.

Mankind is preparing to leave Earth to colonize Titan but in order to do so, we have to drain the oceans to provide fuel for a huge space station/space ship called the Tet, that hangs up in the sky. The Scavs, though defeated, are still around and seemed interested in destroying the hydro processors; the Tet launches drones to defend the processors but these lethal robots need maintenance. This is where Cruise comes in. He plays Jack, a technician whose duty is to service the drones and protect them from the Scavs

Jack is not utterly alone on Earth, he has been partnered with Victoria, Andrea Riseborough, who monitors Jack's movements and acts as a liaison with Mission Control in the Tet. The pair of them live in a glass stilt house high above the earth and high above the clouds

The movie starts out with a very deliberate pace; Jack and Vic's life seem rather placid for the fact they live on a planet that is badly wounded. These are among my favorite scenes in the movie; you know that something isn't right here, that the picture is a little too perfect. And sure enough, the cracks in the pretty picture soon begin to form. Jack is haunted by dreams, dreams of the past, of the earth's past, of his own past but this cannot be so; for reasons of security his and Vic's memories had been scrubbed before they began the mission. Yet in his mind he sees himself in New York, on the Empire State Building, with a strange woman.

On top of that, the woman who speaks to them from Mission Control is down right creepy. A space craft, a human space craft, suddenly crashes on to the earth and Jack learns that all is not as it seems. So now we are in a dystopia, another one of my favorite sci fi genres; think Logan's Run, where the policeman keeping the law soon comes to realize that the law may just be a bit fucked up. It just gets worse. Enter Morgan Freeman.

Jack is shocked to learn that there are other humans still on Earth. Morgan and his band of grubby survivors are here to point out to Jack that the war may not be over, or it may not be exactly as it may seem. The spacecraft has a survivor, as portrayed by Olga Kurylenko, and it is the woman Jack has been seeing in his dreams. Morgan sets them out on a mission, into the radioactive zone, suggesting that out there, Jack may find his destiny. Yup, now we are in The Planet of the Apes, only without the apes and a motorcycle instead of a horse

I want to avoid spoilers here, as Oblivion is still in theatres, but before the movie ends, several more sci fi cliches are thrown into the mix. The movie begins and it moves some place but there are a few logic jumps in the middle and I'm not sure if the timeline works. The movie is strangely devoid of emotion, even when the story demands it.

Oblivion was directed by Joseph Kosinski, who also did Tron Legacy. I quite enjoyed Tron Legacy. It was completely gorgeous to look at, it had a lot of momentum that carried you along, tension was built and it actually had an emotional core. Oblivion is certainly gorgeous to look at, its post apocalyptic Earth is one of the most impressive I've ever seen.

There is action in the movie, quite well done, from high level physical stunts to nicely filmed flight and fight sequences. After all, this is a Tom Cruise movie, so you get your Top Gun moments and your obligatory Tom-running-with-emotion moments. But, oddly, the tension never really seems to build. While I admire the movie for its slow build, and there are some great action sequences, I never really felt pulled into the story, I wanted to know what was going to happen but I never needed to know. Unlike Tron, the movie lacks a strong emotional connection, I was interested but not invested. Some of this actually makes sense, some of the characters seem devoid of emotion and I understand the reasoning but it was still difficult to be concerned with them

Oblivion is very much a pastiche and not as entertaining or compelling as B Movie pastiches that Quentin Tarantino throws together, but in the long run, I think it works. It's a good vehicle for Cruise, not as powerful as Minority Report but the kind of thing this dude can pull off. It hones very close to Matrix-style mind fucks but never gets there but its a very entertaining suburb. It won't rank as one of the best sci fi movies I've ever seen but I know a lot of these images will stick in my head; and when you're my age, any memory that sticks is worth something ... much as the memories of a life he may or may not have lead stays with Jack in a world where the Moon bleeds across the sky.

UBIK: Spray this on you and don't question

Philip K Dick is sneaky. Perhaps more accurate terms would be subversive or insidious but I think sneaky works as well. A writer who had an agenda, a writer whose goal was to undermine your sense of reality and to shake you up, who did so while you thought you were reading something called "science fiction"

Case in point, his novel UBIK, published in 1969. This is a book I read, or read part of, a very long time ago, at a point in my life when I was ingesting two or three science fiction novels a week; as I started to read the book again I realized there was a lot of it, the details, that I had forgotten

I had forgotten how funny it was. There are scenes where characters argue with their vending machines; in this future world you have to pay to do or use just about anything. In an early scene, one of the main characters attempts to leave  his apartment:

The door refused to open. It said: "Five cents please"
.... "I'll pay you tomorrow," he told the door "What I pay you is... is in the nature of a gratuity; I don't have to pay you"
"I think otherwise" the door said"
.... From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began to systematically unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt's money-gulping door.
"I'll sue you" said the door
"I've never been sued by a door. But I guess I'll live through it"

Then there are how characters on this future Earth dress.

G.G. stood there ... wearing his usual mohair poncho, apricot colored felt hat, argyle ski socks and carpet slippers ...

A young stringbean of a girl with glasses ... wearing a cowboy hat, black lace mantilla and Bermuda shorts ... A good looking older dark haired woman ... who wore a silk sari and nylon obi and bobby socks .... A wooly haired boy ... in a floral mumu and Spandex bloomers ...

It's funny stuff. And if fools you, it lures you into what appears to be a madcap adventure with a deep aura of zaniness. But of course there is much more going on here. Dick was a master of Pirandello, a theatrical conceit that essentially says "I'm about to fool you, I'm going to show you something that you know can't be real but as you watch it, you'll believe it is real" In Dick's case, if you are familiar with his work, you know that he is going to give you a story where reality is somehow altered. You know he's going to do it to you, you are watching the signs .. and as you watch the signs you realize that the whole conceit started about two chapters back

The world of UBIK is one where telepaths and precogs exist and companies are created to prevent these individuals from using their powers against you. Our nominal hero, Joe Chip, works for one of these companies and it is his job to prevent telepaths from using their abilities in a negative way. It is also a world where people never really die. When the body expires, the mind can be maintained, functioning in a half-life, able to communicate with people in the living world. Their world may or not be real at least to us and our world may or not be real to them ... yup, we are deep in the world view of Philip Dick

When reading this novel, or any Dick book, you are constantly questioning exactly what is real. In UBIK, as Joe is shown different levels of reality, he begins to sense that there are entities behind everything, controlling his world view, to purposes of their own. What are they: Gods, telepaths, people laying in coffins half alive ... Dick was never one to just show us different realities, he was one to make us question if anything was in control of those realities and why we are not. UBIK is a can of spray that when used, brings Joe back to his reality. But where did the can from and why do they want Joe to use it ..

There is something to the point that salvation, in this story, comes in the form of a spray can, a product. There is a focus on objects, on commercial objects, in this novel. Brand names become important. As does money, beyond the fact it costs you to get out of your own house. Commercialism may be the thing that binds the realities together, or it may be the thing that makes them all tenuous

Dick was an author who moved comfortably inside the conventions of the science fiction lexicon of the late 1960's. But he was also a writer very familiar with different cultures and their religions, their deities, their views of the afterlife. In this book, while describing how people dressed he also dipped into the Platonic concept of a base reality; in the story Joe is being pushed back in time and he realizes that there is always a space-time reality behind everything, a master time, upon which all other times are built

This is science fiction, I think, in the barest of terms. Yes the book takes place in the future and yes there is space travel. But Dick uses one sentence to describe a trip from Earth to the Moon; he devotes an entire chapter to describe Joe, under the influence of some malevolent reality, going up a flight of stairs. As he ascends Joe must try to figure out what is real, where he is, who is doing this to him and if there is actually something being done ... this is the kind of journey that occupies Dick at his bets.

And UBIK was one of his best.

THINGS LEFT BEHIND

This weekend we had our first garage sale to raise money for Collette's 60 K walk to support breast cancer research at the Princess Margaret Hospital. Everything went pretty well, the weather co operated, a couple of Collette's co workers came by and were of tremendous help. We ended up making over 300 hundred dollars and were happy with that; we are doing it again in a couple of weeks and hope to improve on that number. At any rate Collette is now over the half way mark for the amount of money she is obligated to raise in order to do the walk.


One of the things that happened that we did not expect was the number of people who donated items to the cause. Our neighbour Jesse brought over an air hockey table and a wrought iron bed frame for us to sell, Collette's principal, Susan, brought an antique style phone and some other items. Very generous indeed but it left us with items at the end of the sale that we did not have at the beginning; isn't this contrary to the whole exercise? Well, that is why we are having a second sale.


Sorting through the house for things to sell was really a process of deciding what we were going to let go of, finding the things we were going to leave behind; as in, I no longer need/want/care for this, so I will put it behind me. We put out or VHS movies (long since moved on to DVDs) I put out a lot of books (read it, never read it in ten years, have three other copies) we don't need these portable CD players, we have an MP3 player now. It was not painful parting with these items, we had, I suppose, grown out of them.


That happens with certain aspects of our lives, too. As we go along, we put things behind us, we "outgrow" them, often without really being aware that we have.


When I was a kid I was an avid comic book reader. Supherheroes. My brother Ed used to read me the text while we looked at the pictures. It was how I learned to read. The first one I remember was Daredevil, when he still had the yellow and black suit. I can remember once a month being given a dollar and walking for miles, from store to store, collecting all the latest editions of my favorite titles, till the dollar was gone. In those days a comic was 8 cents so I would trudge back home with my dozen or so comics, locking myself in my room, and just going on an orgy of superheroes and super villains.


My love for comics continued right on through high school and into my early twenties. We were entering into "graphic novel" territory by then but I still gravitated towards the guys in the costumes with super powers. Though, the one "comic book" I still have is a one off graphic novel, story by Samuel Delaney, art by Howard Chaykin; not a superhero but a science fiction tale.


I haven't bought or even looked at a comic book since the early 80s. I watch some of the movies but most of them are shite, really. But my reading tastes have moved on and I have no regrets about that. I still pick up a graphic novel from time to time but I am no longer interested in the flying guys in the colorful tights.


Another thing I used to be passionate about was science fiction. I am talking literature here rather than movies, but I loved the films too. Science fiction spun out of the comic books. I was obsessed with the stuff, for a long time it was all that I read. I went to a few conventions, and went to readings whenever I could. While sorting through books to sell at the garage sale, I found a hardcover Harlan Ellison, signed by the author. I had forgotten all about it; needless to say I didn't sell it for two bucks.


Science fiction is what inspired me to write. Most of my early short stories were ripped off from Lovecraft or Bradbury, complete with the flowery prose. In high school I used to co author Heinlein style space epics with my friend, Tanya Huff. She, of course, has gone on to be a fulltime science fiction/fantasy author.


My love for science fiction continued well on into my forties. I began to get fussier, though. I tended to stick to a small group of authors like Robert Reed and William Gibson and CJ Cherryh and Tanith Lee, who could A: actually write B: had some clue of character development and C: had some originality. I re-read those books occasionally but when I peruse the science ficiton section of a bookstore now, there is very little to inspire me. My reading taste has become more eclectic, my time for reading more limited, and there just seems to be too many other literary options to pursue.


Having said that, I could not depart with any of my Phillip K Dick novels. If he was still alive, perhaps I'd still be reading "science fiction"

What happens to these great passions that, during the moment of experiencing them, seem so overwhelming and all consuming. If we outgrow them, how is that so, what does that mean? Did I become too mature for superheroes? Well, maybe. There was a time when the superhero comic books maintained, over a year of monthly issues, long and complex storylines that would include character development; the Avengers introduced a character called the Vision who may or not be human and their development of that concept was at least as complex as any Star Trek version. In the seventies, Denny Lane took two of DC's more lack lustre characters, Green Lantern and Green Arrow and sent them on a long road journey to "discover Amercia" It seems that in recent years (decades) the regular monthly superhero comics are long on graphic displays and short on story line.

But what about science fiction? I'm sure there are still as many relevant novels in that field today as there were back when I read two or three of them a week. But I look at the glossy covers now and it is always number two in a series of four that, in itself, is a subset of a series of twenty that was spun out of a series of ten .. and my interest wanes as I stand there. But really, it has nothing to do with content. I think it has more to do with me. Opening my eyes, discovering new authors, looking for works of art that have more relevance to my everyday life, looking for stories and characters with whom I connect.

Perhaps that is maturity, as much as I am loathe to admit it.

Comic books and space stories are not the only things I have left behind, and they are not the most important. As I've gotten older I left behind jealously, and anger and a lot of self doubt ... not that any of that does not still exist, they are just in manageable portions. Those are the important things we leave behind.

Gosh, that really does sound like growing up.