It had to take place in 2077. While Tom Cruise could easily have his time scale wrong, and his wife could have just been frozen for longer, Morgan Freeman’s character remembered back to the time before this was going on. And if you can’t trust Morgan Freeman on something, I don’t know what you can trust.

The radiation zones were fake, at least one for certain to keep each of the drone techs from interacting, for obvious reasons.

Jenai–

I completely agree. Things don’t quite add up. The funny part is, I got the heads up about writing this because the Moon would be destroyed and the person wanted to know what to say when asked about that. I think that pretty much everything set out in the premise of the movie is possibly false. How do we know the year is still 2077? It could easily be 2562. If each set of clones only lasts 5 years, they could just tell them all a false year. A different timescale would change the effect of the Moon’s changes as well. Isn’t it possible that those cities that were destroyed by earthquakes caused by the Moon’s semi-destruction were actually killed off by the Tet? (I think it’s “Tet” short for “Tetrahedron” but I could be wrong).

So I wrote the above “science review” based on the story presented at the beginning of the movie, partly because that’s fewer spoilers, and partly because that’s the more interesting science to debunk. :)

And those radiation zones? Couldn’t those just be faked? Or was it obvious that they were faked? I just don’t remember.

-Alice

Is it established that they did indeed blow up the moon? That was what Jack *thought* certainly, but I thought, later on, it was implied that the moon was harvested to death for energy. [They 'ate' the moon]. (I would assume bits and pieces cracked off over time, even a short period of time, during this process, and were eventually pulled into earth orbit or lunar orbit – The Tev may have even pulled some larger chunks into Earth orbit itself to maintain stability or for future mining). The same process was currently underway on the earth, albeit in a much longer process.

It is a bit hard to figure out, since all the backstory in the beginning of the movie is an outright lie. It’s not supposed to be ‘feasible’, per se, hence why Harper’s curiosity was a good thing. Things didn’t quite ‘add up’.

Whether or not nuclear devices were really used isn’t even clear. Jack thought they were; it was part of the story to explain the ‘radiation zones’ he wasn’t to go into, and the devestation of the planet. (Which was supposed to be the changing of the climate/weather/geography due to the planet being affected by the Tev’s geothermal energy harvesting, or somesuch).

And yes, the planet was not goign to be sucked dry in two weeks. They were likely going to be terminated and replaced; it’s unlikely the effectiveness of any team lasted more than five years due to aging.

The one thing I’m still confused by is the record that Tom Cruise chooses to play. I swear the cover of the album looks just like my Mom’s Vangelis Albedo 0.39 cover (Google search). I thought that would be a hilarious tie-in… but then the song was something else. ::sad face::

Since we only see the cover for a second, I’m betting that I’m wrong, and the cover was correct for the song, and I was just primed to see tie-ins.

I wasn’t under the impression that it’d be dried up in 2 weeks… I thought they were just going to “Titan” in two weeks, and that they’d be replaced by another crew. I thought the period of time to suck the planet dry was indefinite. But, I only saw it the once.

My summary is definitely “Moon meets Top Gun, with a good-sized pinch of the Matrix, Portal II, 2001, and Star Wars.” (How could you NOT think of jawas?)

-Alice

Thanks for posting this! I saw Oblivion this weekend, and had many scientific grumblies, which you helped confirm. I will also add a couple others that bugged me.

The alien spacecraft appears to orbit just once per day, despite appearing to be somewhere in low Earth orbit, where it should have gone around once every 90 minutes or so. Also, with space navigable drones, a smart alien race would have set up a TDRS-style satellite system to avoid comm blackouts.

The NASA hardware uses a mix of the worm logo that they did away with in 1992 and the current blue meatball logo. While it is possible that the agency would return to a mix of the two in the future, it left me with the impression that they got all their technology from the JSC gift shop.

The dashboard on the Odyssey spacecraft displays STS-152. This stands for Space Transportation System-152. It is a mission designator specifically used during the Shuttle program. Again, this made me snort a little derisively when I saw it permanently tattooed on a future spacecraft.

When Tom Cruise had to explain that Titan was a moon of Saturn to his wife, THE NASA ASTRONAUT AND RESEARCHER! Apparently, NASA got into the habit of hiring folks who know nothing about space or the destination they were headed to on their final mission.

There seemed to be an awful lot of rainy weather happening on a planet that was just two weeks away from being sucked dry. While the removal of the oceans certainly would have disrupted weather patterns, I would expect more along the lines of Martian dust storms than regular rain squalls. It also seems odd that the water suckers are positioned on the coast, next to New York City. It would seem they should be at the deepest points in the ocean, like a drinking straw at the bottom of a glass to get everything.

Ultimately, I enjoyed watching it once, found many unintentionally funny moments, and summarize it as Tom Cruise in Sand People vs. the Matrix.