Today's News: Kosinski goes to... the Twilight Zone

Hot off MovieScene:

http://www.moviescene.nl/p/149343/oblivion_regisseur_betreedt_de_twilight_zone

You can't keep a good idea down. I'm currently still working my way through the classic Twilight Zone series (just started Season 4 with its eerie one-hour episodes) and I continue to be amazed by some of the mindblowing stories they got away with in the early Sixties. Granted, there's a fair share of not so intriguing or even downright boring episodes too, but show me an episodic television series that does not suffer from the occasional yawner. Considering the series has been rebooted twice and made into a movie as well, it's not surprising it would crop up again sooner or later. Every generation needs its own Twilight Zone. Okay, we had one only ten years ago but that lasted only one season so apparently it wasn't very good (I intend to watch it someday to judge for myself though), but in this day and age where television has outdone feature films in terms of quality and popularity, we can do better. And hopefully we will. Few will disagree The Twilight Zone works best as a television series, but I'm not averse to the idea of another big screen adaptation either (preferably one without horrible helicopter accidents this time), but to present only a single story sounds like a mistake, unless it's a really good one. Though the notion of stuffing it with references to Rod Serling's other classic stories is a fascinating one, I can only see it work as a way of pleasing the fans while potentially confusing the general audience. I much prefer the route of telling multiple stories and interweaving them to only a minor extent á la Sin City, briefly connecting but not getting in each other's way more than needs be. As for the director, Joseph Kosinski is neither the best nor the worst pick (though I would rather have seen Matt Reeves picking up this project). He has shown to have some affinity for telling intricate stories with hardcore Sci-Fi ideas (not that The Twilight Zone is a science fiction show per se, as it also incorporates various other genres), but both Tron: Legacy and especially Oblivion suffered from flaws in execution. Whether that was the case because of flawed writing or studio interference remains unclear, but I'm willing to cut Kosinski some slack. After all, though both of the films he directed were big budget action flicks, he's still a fairly inexperienced director and he may just need a bit more seasoning. Third time is the charm perhaps? We'll have to wait and see, but as long as they stick close to Serling's original writing (which really requires little improvement), it's hard to go wrong entirely.

And now for another week of vacation. But not in... the Twilight Zone. Dum-dum-dum-dum, dum-dum-dum-dum, dum-dum-dum-dum. Be sure to try Oasis,

Today's minireview: Oblivion

Oblivion: **/*****, or 5/10

Disappointing sci-fi actioner by Tron: Legacy director Joseph Kosinksi, yet another one of those flicks that seems to think that having Tom Cruise in every single scene makes for a good film in itself. This time Cruise plays a military veteran stationed at a small base up in the sky, from where he and his female co-worker (Andrea Riseborough) oversee and conduct repairs on a vast network of drones, which is used to safeguard giant machines scouring the planet of its last remaining natural resources. After all, we are talking about a post-apocalyptic Earth here, ravaged by war between humanity and some alien species, that witnessed most of the planet becoming uninhabitable to human life. Therefore, mankind left the planet and settled elsewhere, leaving Cruise and his drones as a sort of worldwide mop-up crew (think Wall-E). Or so Cruise thinks. His world is turned upside down soon enough when he encounters an underground force of human rebels who fight to preserve what's left of their planet under the command of Morgan Freeman (who unfortunately has much too small a role; he deserves better and so do we). The ugly truth is revealed when it turns out Cruise is the true alien evil and there's hundreds of duplicates of himself, an army of clones engineered by extraterrestrial intelligence to stripmine the planet while being unaware of the real facts, just hoping to soon complete their job and go home (think Moon). Of course the real bad guy – a giant super computer with its own nefarious agenda (think I, Robot) – won't allow Cruise to switch sides so easily and thus a rather boring fight ensues between the rebels and the drones. Despite the sometimes intriguing premise of the main character finding out his whole life is a lie so he needs to reinvent himself, existential questions about the nature of the self are briskly ignored in favour of monotonous action scenes involving guns, bikes and funky aircraft, all of them seemingly designed by the Apple Corporation, considering the film's overreliance on slick, white, minimalistic looking technology. After a while, shots of Cruise flying around in his little helicopter get exceedingly tedious. At least the spectacular Iceland vistas do not, nor do the grand sights of famous (digital) architecture left to rot in desolate landscapes. And it is gratifying to see Hollywood jumping on the 'creepy drone technology' bandwagon so quickly (though it will probably brand the movie as 'soooo 2013' in years to come). But despite a few points in Oblivion's favour, it can't be helped this film is simply dull and derivative.