As an unofficial kickoff to the summer movie season, Oblivion opened April 19 and plunged us into the kind of world that, for whatever reason, we always want to see while eating popcorn. Remnants of New York City landmarks like the Empire State Building and the public library littered the earth. Tom Cruise lived in a glass palace in the clouds, and roamed the destroyed earth each day to repair drones. And somewhere, way out in space, the rest of humanity lived in exile, forced off the planet by an alien foe.

But as you might have learned by now, not everything in Oblivion is as it seems, and the movie from writer/director Joseph Kosinski takes many, many twists on its way to the grand finale. Which is why it was such a treat to talk to Kosinski over the phone last week. With Oblivionalready off and running in theaters he felt free to dig into spoilers, and answer some of the burning questions that we all had walking out of his thoughtful sci-fi effort.

Kosinski, who is currently gearing up for a Tron:Legacy sequel but still won’t swear it’s his next project, talked to me about the film’s sci-fi design, what purpose humans might serve even in an alien-dominated future, how there might be a sequel, and why he gave Zoe Bell her second completely silent role in just a few months (after Django Unchained).

SPOILERS FOR OBLIVION FOLLOW, OBVIOUSLY

You’ve talked a lot about the Bell 47 helicopter as the inspiration for the design for the bubbleship, but you haven’t talked much about the design of the drones. How did those emerge for you?
I knew I wanted all of the designs in the world of the Tet to be based on primary shapes. The Tet itself is obviously a pyramid, or tetrahedron– Tet is short for tetrahedron. The bubbleship is a series of spheres based on the Bell 47 helicopter. I liked the idea that, since the technology is shared, the drone is basically the same as one of the engine balls on the bubbleship. That’s basically where we started. I wanted to keep it as pure as possible but menacing at the same time, and almost treat it like a piece of military hardware. We spent a lot of time working on the face of the drone, trying to come up with something that felt functional but intimidating, and after many many versions we kind of settled on the version you see in the movie.

Did you ever look at Eve from Wall-E?
i’d say she’s a little too elegant. She’s very streamlined and feminine, and the drones had to be a little more aggressive and beat-up. I thought of them more as kind of like little tanks.

Is the Tet trying to mimic human design, or are you just trying to make them seem relatively human-like so we don’t know where the story is going?
I tried to make all the design consistent across the board. The only thing that would be humanlike about the designs are the things that humans interact with. The Tet took in the Odyssey module, decoded our language and ways we interface with things and then recreated that for Jack and Vica, recreated a world where they would be using an alphanumeric system they would be familiar with. The only design changes would be stuff to adapt to human use. It has the Odyssey module, so it knows that humans sit in chairs, we use switches, we have a certain language and screens and stuff. They would obviously study domestic dwellings in order to create the sky tower as a habitat for each of the teams to live in. That’s kind of it. It’s taking certain elements to make sure we can function properly within them. They understood that humans need food and light and water, and a swimming pool would be great for exercise, so it’s all done with very specific functional requirements.

When you sit back and say “What would an alien need to learn about people?” that requires removing yourself a lot from your own humanity. Is that something you’ve always been able to do?
That’s the process. Visually, the world of Oblivion was something that I had in my head from the very beginning, for whatever reason. The Sky Tower and really that juxtaposition between the world above the clouds and the world below, and the notion of Jack and Vica living up in the clouds in this clean environment versus the reality of human struggle happening below the surface. That juxtaposition, and the internal struggle that Jack’s going through at the beginning of the film– “This is what I know, but what I actually feel is something different.” I always knew visually how I wanted to represent the world, and when it gets down to working at the logic. Why is the Tet using human beings? And if you were trying to create a sheltered world for these teammates to work in, how do you keep [the other clones] from discovering each other, how do you keep them happy? How do you keep the functioning, and what happens when they are no longer an effective team? How do you set the reset button and start fresh?

So, why does the Tet use human beings?
Well there’s a little clue when Jack goes to the stadium, the drone 166 has been shot down and the fuel cell has been taken and its been damaged. Vica says to Jack, “The whole central core is off alignment, you don’t have the necessary tools down there.” And Jack uses a piece of chewing gum to glue a piece back in place so that it works. That is an example of something that only a human can do. That level of ingenuity, that level of improvisation is something that we are very good at. The Tet realizes that we are very useful at thinking on our feet and on the fly. That’s why humans make great drone repairman. What the Tet didn’t realize is that same level of ingenuity and what it is that makes us special ultimately leads to us getting the idea that maybe there’s a way to take down the system.

We see the Tet at the end– were there ever any creatures? Was it always that Borg voice?
Y’know, I met with a group of scientists at the beginning of this project. My own belief, and the consensus among the scientists, was that if we ever actually encounter another intelligent life form, it will much more likely be in the way it is depicted in Oblivion than the way it’s depicted in other science fiction films. It won’t be some other bipedal creature. The time required to travel the distances that exist between stars is so great that organic life forms aren’t going to be able to survive the trip. Any hyper-advanced civilization that has the technology to do what the Tet does is going to be a deeply digital life form. We’re ants on an ant hill, basically.

When you hear that, is that exciting for you? That seems terrifying to me.
It was fascinating. It was gratifying, because a lot of the concepts I had set up for the film, like the destruction of the moon, turned out to actually be very effective ways to invade the earth. The notion of heavy hydrogen or deuterium existed in our seawater as being a very special thing in the universe. Heavy hydrogen is an element that exists in very trace amounts in our seawater, and it’s used to create kind of the purest form of fusion energy. that’s one thing that makes Earth valuable, that energy source. Otherwise the only thing that’s really useful about human kid is our creative– jazz and rock and roll is what makes us unique.

Why did you use the remnants of New York as the setting for most of the action?
I was a New Yorker for nine years, so it’s an area I know very well. Also when you’re trying to create a story that plays around the world, and show places that everyone will recognize as being on earth, New York is one of those places. It has those iconic monuments that people will recognize. It’s the same reason the Statue of Liberty was used at the end of Planet of the Apes. I guess I could have set it in London or Paris, but New York is a place I know well and I love the idea of being able to walk on to the 86th floor observatory at ground level. That notion really sold the idea of how far earth had been transformed.

Yeah, the landscape in this looks nothing like the New Jersey you see from the top of the Empire State Building now.
No, and that was a surreal thing. We literally shot on the Empire State Building in the middle of Manhattan one week, and then flew to Iceland and shot on the Empire State Building set that we’d built in the side of a mountain the next week. It was a very surreal, almost Jack-like mind game to experience that same effect.

Zoe Bell has essentially a silent role, and I wonder if she and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau originally had bigger parts.
Not really, there’s maybe a couple of shots I cut out that we shot with the two of them. But there was no bigger storyline. The focus of this movie was really the relationship between Jack, Vica and Julia, with Beech being an important part of that. The roles were never really any bigger than that. I just couldn’t do the three-hour version of the movie.

This seems made specifically so that there can be no sequel. Is that something you were committed to?
No, you never say never. At one point I had a sequence, which I wasn’t able to do, which was a flashback to young Beech fighting in the streets of Chicago when the invasion first happened. When I think about a sequel, it almost feels like if there was a desire to do another Oblivionmovie, for me the prequel might be the most interesting notion, actually seeing the invasion through the eyes of a young Beech.

Universal Pictures - Tom Cruise in Oblivion.

By Michael O’Sullivan,

“Oblivion” looks marvelous, in the deliciously dystopian way of so many post-apocalyptic films. It’s set in 2077, after alien invaders called Scavengers (or “Scavs”) have laid waste to our moon, leading to cataclysmic floods and earthquakes that have ravaged Earth. The film features gorgeous CGI shots of such broken, half-buried landmarks as the Washington Monument and the Empire State Building, whose observation deck can now be accessed by walking onto it from a mountain of rubble. It’s the kind of film that’s perfect for the Imax format in which some theaters are offering it.Just be warned that this means it’s also very, very loud. One joker at a preview screening shouted, “Volume!” as the film was barely getting under way, to much laughter. He wasn’t complaining that it was too quiet.

It ought to look good. The movie, by director Joseph Kosinski (“Tron: Legacy”), is said to be based on a graphic novel by Kosinski and comic book writer Arvid Nelson. Although that book was never published — and probably never will be — the mock-up of the story drew the attention of star Tom Cruise, along with not one, but two, studios. Disney, which originally had the rights, ultimately gave them up to Universal, which made the film.

It’s an engrossing, if complicated and twisty, story, with plentiful sci-fi action and a provocative subtext about the nature of the human soul. At times, however, the balance between those two things feels off. Some of the fight sequences, which involve robotic flying “drones” mounted with guns, go on a bit longer than is strictly necessary.

Cruise plays Jack Harper, a futuristic maintenance man whose dangerous job consists of repairing the drones that patrol Earth, an unpopulated wasteland where giant “hydro rigs” convert seawater into energy to be used by what’s left of the human race, which has relocated to a colony on one of Saturn’s moons. Although we’ve won the war against the Scavs, there are still some left, and they like to sabotage the hydro rigs and the drones almost as much as they enjoy trying to kill Jack.

He and his partner/lover, Victoria (Andrea Riseborough), who provides backup from a command center in the clouds, have their work cut out for them, but it’s more routine than glamorous. “We’re the mop-up crew,” Jack says.

All is not as it appears, however. That scenario, as laid out by Jack in voice-over narration, soon starts to show cracks. The Scavs’ terrorist-style activities pick up, and a spacecraft loaded with humans in suspended animation crash-lands on Earth, drawn by an electronic beacon emanating from the surface. It’s suddenly as if the order of Jack’s world is turned upside down, including his understanding of who the good guys and the bad guys are. Even Jack and Victoria’s boss, Sally (Melissa Leo), who supervises their work from an orbiting satellite called the Tet, starts to seem not quite so maternal as she did at the beginning of the film.

More important, Jack starts to question his own identity; indeed, the very nature of identity itself. It’s worth noting that, although Jack and Victoria underwent mandatory “memory wipes” that erased everything they knew before starting these jobs, Jack is plagued by strange dreams of a pre-war Earth — a time when he wouldn’t even have been born — and of a beautiful but mysterious woman (Olga Kurylenko).

The film’s big reveal is satisfying but requires some mental effort. This is not a movie during which you should fall asleep. Fortunately, there’s not much chance of that. “Oblivion” is fast-paced and exciting.

As for the elephant in the room, it must be said that going to a Tom Cruise movie these days is more complicated than it used to be. The real-world baggage that this sometimes kooky tabloid staple brings to the screen is, for many, harder to ignore than it is with other movie stars, with the possible exception of Lindsay Lohan. That said, Cruise makes for a fine and even appealing action hero, perhaps because his character is someone without an apparent past. It’s as if “Oblivion” is inviting us to undergo our own memory wipes before seeing the film.

If you’re able to forgive and forget, “Oblivion” isn’t a bad place to start loving Tom Cruise all over again.

PG-13. At area theaters. Contains obscenity, brief nudity and some violence. 125 minutes.

BEIJING – Radical Studios and the Beijing-based Le Vision Pictures have joined forces in a new venture aimed at making films in and about China.

The brainchild of Radical’s co-founders Barry Levine and Jesse Berger and Le Vision CEO Zhang Zhao, Radical Vision China – which will be launched at the Le Vision Picture Summit in Beijing today – is aiming to begin production of its first film, a first installment of a sci-fi trilogy about a struggle against an evil emperor, at the end of 2013.

Described by the companies as a “multi-million investment” with Le Vision being the major stakeholder, the new venture allows the US company – which has just overseen the international release of its sci-fi hit Oblivion – to have “local access to stories, talent and distribution and a partnership that compliments both Le Vision Pictures and Radical Studios individual strengths while respecting the philosophical and historical integrity of the Chinese culture”, according to Levine.

“It’s been Radical Studios’ goal from when Jesse and I started the company to create content that would apply to a global audience with a unique world vision,” he continued. “At the same time we have always had a healthy respect for the quality of films that were coming out of China and the emerging Asian entertainment market.”

Their first collaboration will be Clans of the Sacred Stones, is described by the newly established company as as a “sci-fi blockbuster inspired by ancient Chinese literature” and  one which “dramatically reimagines some of China’s most famous heroes”. Set as a science fiction  trilogy in a dystopian future, the story follows a group of ordinary men and women rising up to fight an evil emperor.

A Radical spokesperson told The Hollywood Reporter the film, produced by Le Vision Pictures, Radical Studios and Matlock Stone, is budgeted at around US$120 million and to be partly filmed in China with a cast comprising Chinese and international stars. Other projects in the pipeline include Snow Beast andSun Chaser.

Levine and Berger founded Radical Publishing in 2007, with the company changing its name to Radical Studios as the company expands beyond its comic-book business into filmmaking. Apart from Oblivion, which is produced and released by Universal, the company is also preparing for the beginning of production next month of Brett Ratner’s Dwayne Johnson-starring Hercules with MGM and Paramount Pictures, slated for release in July 2014.

Le Vision Pictures, meanwhile, is now best known for its success in making The Expendables 2 a hit on mainland China. A financier and distributor of the film, Zhang’s company steered Sylvester Stallone’s movie into blockbuster status in the country, taking US$54 million during its September 2012 run at a time when The Dark Knight Rises and The Amazing Spider-Man were also on release.

The company is now working with Nu-Image/Millenium on The Expendables 3 and Automata, the Antonio Banderas-starrer co-produced by the Spanish actor’s Green Moon, Tarak Ben Ammar‘s Quinta Communications and mini-studio Vertice 360.

Le Vision is also the backer of the multiple-nominated Chinese production The Bullet Vanishes, as well as of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s upcoming project The Assassin.

The company was also the backer of the multiple-nominated Chinese production The Bullet Vanishes, as well as of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s upcoming project The Assassin.

The company will announce the establishment of a Los Angeles branch today, with former Walt Disney Studios and Warner Independent Pictures executive Michael Andreen as CEO.

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