In Defense of Oblivion

      Why defend Oblivion? Oblivion doesn’t need any sort of defense—it’s a big, very loud sci-fi flick that has made more than enough money already and can only be shameless Hollywood product that meant to indulge what little of your brain it can why throwing as much trash onto the screen possible. Right? Big products like this with big studios and big stars only care about grabbing paychecks and moving onto the next shameless project. Studios can’t care about craft.

            That’s a lot of the rhetoric I’ve seen thrown around Oblivion, a film that I feel the need to defend, not just as something that I found quite entertaining, but also something that I think perceptions of what it aspires to be often cloud the judgment of viewers. Oblivion is far from perfect—it actually has numerous issues that keep it from being anything truly worth upholding as a major work—but the reason it needs defense is that once one draws a party line, one begins to see everything in the film as a problem. One begins to point the moments of interest and simply call them bad instead of thinking through them. Yes, Oblivion has good things and bad things—but it also has interesting things worth discussing, and to discuss their meaning, their narrative function, and, yes, their artistry is what I find why I need to defend Oblivion—not for the sake of giving the film more of an audience, but to hope that every film can get a proper due, no matter who or what is behind it.