BEFORE: I'm finishing off August with a chain of sci-fi movies - mostly recent, plus whatever space-related films are left in the bin. This one's first, so that Morgan Freeman can carry over from "Now You See Me".
AFTER: I remember seeing the trailer for this in the theater, probably when we saw "Star Trek Into Darkness", and something at the time told me that there'd be some kind of twist in the plot, otherwise the film would just really be "Wall-E" with Tom Cruise starring as the lonely robot. But was I able to guess the twist just from the scenes in the trailer? You bet.
Part of it is just common sense - the set-up tells us that Earth has been made uninhabitable by a war with invading aliens, yet here's our hero, inhabiting an uninhabitable place. Why him? Why did all the humans relocate to one of Jupiter's moons, but not him and his lady-friend? Then we've got the mystery of his dreams of the past, which aren't even supposed to exist after a memory-wipe - how is that possible?
I'm still defiantly anti-spoiler, so that's as far as I go. I've only re-stated what info is given out in the first 2 minutes of the film, so I've given away nothing, or maybe I've given away everything. For a true sci-fi fan, it's not hard to put two and two together and come up with four. Five might have been a nice surprise, but nope, it's four.
...or so I thought, expecting a rehashed mash-up of "Moon", perhaps filtered through "The Island". Which it wasn't, umm, until it was. Throw in a call-back to "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace", and we're most of the way there. While I have to admit there's some stuff at the end that seems sort of both Kubrick-like and totally original at the same time, it also gets more flashback-y too, to the point where I had a hard time discerning what was happening and what was a memory.
NITPICK POINT: It's a nice shout-out to "Planet of the Apes" to show the torch from the Statue of Liberty, but with mountains rising up over it? Ditto for the NYC bridges and buildings, with just the top parts visible and the rest seemingly buried underground. I could understand if the cities of today would be covered by water in the future, but where did all the extra dirt come from?
Also starring Tom Cruise (last seen in "Rock of Ages"), Andrea Risebrough, Olga Kurylenko (last seen in "Quantum of Solace"), Melissa Leo (last seen in "The Fighter"), Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Zoe Bell (last seen in "Django Unchained").
RATING: 6 out of 10 sleep-pods
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