The Adventures of Indiana Jim

The Adventures of Indiana Jim


Top Ten Unsung Movies

August 05, 2019

If you’ve listened to my podcast for any length of time you’ll know that I’ve wanted to get back to the geek in ArchGEEKologist for some time now. I wanted to do list of top ten films, but not just my top 10 favorite films, which I may get to at some point. This list is of ten films that I love that aren’t necessarily my very favorite ten. Some of my very favorite films are series films like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and The Lord of the Rings, or other blockbusters like Jurassic Park, or action flicks like The Bourne Identity and Taken, or dramas like Dances With Wolves. I also have many favorite films that just aren’t often mentioned in the zeitgeist, if at all. These are my 10 favorite unsung movies–films you may not have seen, or films that people rarely discuss among their favorites.

10 – Oblivion
A Joseph Kosinski film. His Credits include TRON: Legacy, his first feature, and the 2017 release, Only the Brave. The film stars Tom Cruise, Morgan Freeman and Andrea Riseborough, who has performed mostly in small or arthouse films. You may know films such as Birdman with Michael Keaton, Waco and The Death of Stalin, but she also won a Broadcasting Press Guild Award in the UK for Best Actress in the TV film Margaret Thatcher: The Long Walk to Finchley, for which she was also nominated for a BAFTA TV Award. The film also features Olga Kurylenko, for whom notable films include The Room, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote with Adam Driver, and The Death of Stalin alongside Andrea Riseborough, but as an Eastern European model she got dangerously close to being typecast as a femme fatale, playing in action thrillers like Quantum of Solace, Hitman, Max Payne, Erased with Aaron Eckhart and The November Man with Pierce Brosnan. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau also has a small role, who viewers would recognize as Jamie Lannister on Game of Thrones.
The premise of Oblivion is that Jack and Victoria are the last two humans on earth, overseeing the final extraction of the last resources from the planet in a post-apocalyptic future. Jack is the scout who repairs the drones out in the field while Victoria provides visual and technical support from the outpost where they live. Trouble starts when a couple things happen. One, Jack is having flashes of memories he can’t explain, which point to a New York we recognize and a woman Jack doesn’t and two, a craft crash-lands on the surface carrying human passengers. I won’t go any further than that because it really is worth watching yourself.
Oblivion doesn’t fit in with the current crop of Sci-Fi action flicks which seem to rely on a frenetic pace, over-the-top visual effects, explosions and violence, and scores with bombastic synthesized Hans Zimmer type kettle drums and heavy metal string sections. This is a film that takes its time. It’s as much a sci-fi epic as it is a visual art piece with stunning cinematography by Claudio Miranda, an Academy Award winner for The Life of Pi, a Nominee for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and was cinematographer on Disney’s Tomorrowland, as well as all of Kosinski’s other films. The film was also recognized by the Art Directors Guild as a nominee for its Excellence in Production Design Award in 2014. The soundtrack also stands out, with a score by the group M83.
Tom Cruise and Andrea Riseborough effectively carry the drama of the events in the film, while Cruise gets to practice his ever-present action chops–and ride a motorcycle, which Tom Cruise seems to do in almost every film. While the plot seems to borrow liberally from the Science Fiction oeuvre of Heinlein, Clarke or Asimov, it executes on it beautifully. One of the writers of the film was Michael Arndt, under a pseudonym, who has worked on many high-grossing and well-recognized films, most notably the Toy Story franchise as well as a preliminary screen...