Movies by Juggs: Oblivion

Oblivion4Mr. Jon Zagel, lifetime friend of the website and podcast is a damn good critic of movies.  We are privileged to start having his reviews on our site.  To view more of his reviews and to read a spoiler review of Oblivion, hit the links after his review.

This newest review is for Oblivion, the special effects stravaganza of the season, starring Tom Cruise, Morgan Freeman, and some other random people. For the record, I have never read the graphic novel on which this is based, and this is a completely different thing than the video game, the old movie, or any of the dozens of other things out there with the name / title of “Oblivion.”

What did I like about this film? The special effects were great. The cool tech, the neat vehicles, the visuals were awesome, though there was one point when the main character decides to ride a motorcycle instead of his jet pod, which made no sense at all. What else did I like about this film? Nothing, absolutely nothing. This was a terrible movie, and seriously, everyone involved should be ashamed of themselves. The premise, the plot, the science… I was actually feeling physically ill by the end of the film. Rather than seeing this movie, I wish I would have paid some dude outside the theater to just jack me in the stomach as hard as he could. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have felt any worse after the experience, and it wouldn’t have taken nearly as long.

I’m once again forced to make this comment about the premise, as much of what I have to say about this travesty against humanity starts there… As I’ve mentioned in the past, the premise is usually off limits. No matter how insane or inane the premise is, one must accept certain precursors to even have a story at all. This is perfectly fine, as long as the story moves forward from there.

However, when movies, as in this case, start past the premise, and reveal various aspects of the background as the movie continues, not revealing the final pieces of the back story until the last few scenes of the film, the premise sure as hell better be rock solid. It’s a movie about the premise, and the main character spends the entire movie revealing more and more until he’s learned the truth of his and the Earth’s past.

I’ll get into details in the spoiler section, but just know this: every realization, every “twist” in the plot, every new fact introduced, every misinformed and unbelievable character action leads us that much further away from anything even relatively close to an acceptable story. At one point, I actually looked around to make sure that I hadn’t entered some sort of fevered dream state, hallucinating randomness wrapped in chaos, but the slack-jawed and blank stares coming from the fellow movie goers around me, driven nearly into unconsciousness by the assault to their basic human thought processes, forced me to accept that it was reality itself that was struggling to hold together.

Though I had walked in to the theater in good health, I was so sick to my stomach by the end of the film, I had to head home, curl up into a ball on my floor, and weep for the humanity lost by the release of this film. We poor bastards paid good money to see this film, and walked out not realizing, until it was too late, that a part of our soul had just been ripped from us, making us that much less human, and that much more… monsters.

Oblivion scores a pathetic 1.5 out of 5 jugs, gaining the extra half jug from the lowest score because, really, the effects were just that good. Honestly, I’ve never believed that video games or movies cause violence, but I definitely wanted to hurt myself by the end of this film, clawing my eyes out lest I see any more of the crap fest that was this film, ceased only by the realization that I couldn’t gouge out my mind’s eye, and that I might risk scenes from this movie being the only memory of when I had vision. For the love of god, if you ever see this movie, please turn the volume down to zero, as that may be the difference between leaving the experience sane, or as a raving lunatic.

Spoiler Section of Oblivion Review by Juggs!

More excellent reviews by Juggs

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