I watched
Oblivion (2013) last night. It was decent. It was a little slow getting into the plot, and I remember thinking a few times throughout the movie, "Wow, this is a long movie!" But that's not to say I was bored or waiting for it to be over. It was interesting. Ultimately it was a little disappointing, especially because it was such a high budget movie and yet I feel it pulled off the story less well than
Moon (2009), which had a similar plot. (IMDB says Oblivion had a $120,000,000 budget and Moon had a $5,000,000 budget!)
While there were some things in the movie that I thought to myself, "that doesn't make sense why that would happen," the more I think about Oblivion, the more I realize things don't make sense. I could go into more details, but. . . Spoilers!
Then I also watched
The Bourne Legacy (2012) which was probably an alright movie in it's own right, but somewhat disappointing for a Bourne movie. I felt it took too long to get to the fun, secret agent/spy/fight-for-your-life-survival stuff that made the Bourne Trilogy so exciting, and even when they were doing those parts, they didn't seem quite as thrilling as in the Jason Bourne movies. The opening sequence of climbing/hiking through the mountains of Alaska felt too much James Bond or Mission Impossible 2 (which I didn't like because it was too much like James Bond rather than the good, secret, nobody-even-knew-you-were-there covert ops of the first MI). He's supposed to be a superbly trained, smart weaponized human, but that sequence just shows him taking what I considered to be unnecessary risks and exhibiting reckless behavior. I also didn't care much for how the movie kept going to other people's points of view. Especially the female doctor (does it say more about the film or myself that I can only remember her by her false identity name of June? And I wouldn't even remember Aaron's name if she wasn't screaming it out so often, even though he's supposed to be under the cover name of James). I think they needed a better way to build the back story (or current story) than to cut to her point of view. And I don't feel like her character added to the movie. Her part could have been removed and almost everything else could still have played out mostly the same way. And it would have even shaved 30 minutes from the film because they wouldn't have needed to include the scene at her house (totally saw that coming).
When all was said and done, I didn't feel the main character was as well trained or expertly skilled or formidable as Jason Bourne, and yet he's supposed to be an upgrade. As I said, if they would have tried to pass this off as a Bourne-alike without using the Bourne brand, I think I would have considered it a decent movie, but in using the Bourne franchise (of which I'm a fan!) they just weren't able to live up to what I consider the superior examples of the previous movies.
And as much as I love Moby, hearing Extreme Ways at the end of each Bourne film is getting old. . . It was kind of cool to hear it again at the end of the second film, but by the third it was like "Oh... yeah, that song again... except a worse rendition of it..." and it's gotten even worse for Legacy. Bummer.
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The other, more obvious part of the challenge is that the planets get bigger and bigger over time.
