Sixty years hence, after an alien invasion has supposedly been defeated, Jack (Tom) and his partner Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) are ‘an effective team’ on a ruined, abandoned Earth, maintaining ocean-draining devices which are supposed to help humanity (not shown) move to Titan – a story so thin that the trailer gives away that it’s all a lie, and that the scuttling leather-armour types we glimpse aren’t alien scavengers but human survivors – Zoe Bell and Nicolaj Coster-Waldau, bossed by plot-explaining, cigar-smoking Morgan Freeman – who know the real story. It’s a film of aw-shucks, rather than awe … though I suppose it’s too much to ask for Stalker from Hollywood, there should still be room for some ambition in large-scale science fiction. It’s a collage of bits and pieces, smoothly sewn together and with stunning visuals but oddly unmagical and unaffecting – no wonder when its hero, a Tom Cruise type called Jack Harper (Tom Cruise character names always sound like fake IDs), can only be moved by the end of the world because of all the sports he’s missed and ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ on vinyl. This is full of moments that will remind you of previous sf films across a gamut from WALL-E to 2001: A Space Odyssey, with stop-offs at Moon, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Twelve Monkeys, Lifeforce, various Doctor Who serials (ooh look – flying Mechanoids!) and Star Trek episodes, Independence Day, Silent Running and War of the Worlds. It’s always slightly a good sign when a big new science fiction film isn’t a remake or a reboot or a comic book property (though Kosinski apparently did do a comic version before going to script) … however, this falls into that Sucker Punch sub-category of auteurism where someone with visual skills thinks they can put together a script from any old ideas which aren’t nailed down and claim it as an original. However, I remember Stephen Lisberger, director of Tron (and Animalympics and – um – Slipstream), after all these years. ‘From the director of Tron Legacy’, it says on the posters: his name is Joseph Kosinski, which I confess hadn’t stuck in my mind so I had to look it up. It’s like a Duncan Jones movie on a hundred times the budget and with one tenth of the intelligence. NB: these are my notes on the film, not a review – so you might not want to read them if you’ve not seen it yet.
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