Summer holiday is approaching! Which means that many blockbuster movies will be flooding very soon. Before all the superheroes action movies start kicking into the cinemas nearby, I managed to catch “Oblivion†on the big screen before it was taken off the list.
Oblivion is action-packed sci-fi flick, starred by Tom Cruise, directed by Joseph Kosinski (Tron: Legacy). The interesting story begins with Jack Harper, a drone technician working in the deserted Mother Earth that has been completely destroyed during a war between human kind and alien. Human kind won the war by using nuclear bombs, and the Earth paid the price. What’s left of it is just a rubble of fallen, quiet, abandoned planet. All the other survivors have been forced to move to temporary space stations at Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.
What I love about this movie is the stunning visuals of the aftermath of an enormous nuclear war, an Earth abandoned with almost no living signs, no greens, just lotsa sand and fallen buildings. It’s depressingly beautiful in its own way.
Upon watching the movie, one could question – “Can our memories be cloned?â€, “Are some emotional feelings so strong that they are imprinted into our cells?†– (Quoted from my movie buddy, K.L Teo) Those are some questions worth thinking and perhaps it is the main theme of the story. Something the director wants us to think about.Life can pass; memories will stay forever.Anyway, what I personally feel about this movie: Brilliant visuals, in-need plenty of explanations and many rooms for improvements to an otherwise ordinary plot.
I think we put so much focus on Jack Harper that we neglected Julia. There're so many cloned Jacks who feel the same for her. But where's the original one who really dated her, proposed to her, that she spent time with?
ReplyDeleteWhat if one day you came to find out that your other half is a human clone (a perfect one let's say)? Or... would you clone someone when you know that he's going to leave you?
It reminds me of what i read from "The Little Price"...
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"You are not at all like my rose," he said. "As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world."
And the roses were very much embarassed.
"You are beautiful, but you are empty," he went on. "One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you--the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or ever sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose."
"It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important."
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That is an interesting insight. It is true that we have all neglected how Julia feels. But do you remember the last word Julia said to Jack Harper before she was killed by the drone - "It was all about her all along...". Don't you think the storyteller is trying to show that Julia had known it all along, or perhaps just like Jack Harper, she was also having fragments of past memories. Maybe the only thing she knew that moment was her feelings for him and it was the only real to her. And even if it was just for a short moment, she chose to be with him, even in between her own forgotten memories, she already knew all along that Jack Harper had someone else in mind apart from her. And still, she still chose to stay.
ReplyDeleteHaving said that, it was the same as the mind-provoking words you quoted from the book - "It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important." Whether or not he was going to leave Julia was not important, it was the memories spent together that proved that their relationships once existed.
Would you rather have something than nothing at all? ;)