Simotron

Tom Cruise does a good job in this movie – does everything asked of him. The look is great, the idea is some pretty nice cool, sci-fi. Cinematography is great, Iceland is very snowy, peaty and epic-looking.. The use of New York is pretty cheesy and doesn’t make much sense – certain buildings poking-out and then whole streets become canyons – why the rest of the space is filled-in other than to ‘look cool’ remains unsolved..

There’s been some war apparently against some aliens – we won, but really screwed-up the planet in the process (plus the Moon) and so everyone’s buggered-off to live on Saturn’s moon Titan while some huge-ass machines restore the Earth to a habitable state. Tom Cruise is Jack, a droid-mechanic looking after the automated drones which protect the big machines from leftover aliens (scavs) that survived to roam the Earth.

In orbit around the Earth is this huge spaceship called ‘The Tent’ – kinda like one of those pyramidal tetra-packs for Milk you used to see in Europe about 20 years ago (anyone?) which is full of millions of people apparently – and all kinda waiting for Tom to wind-up his shift so they can all head off to Titan with the others..

– but hey, there’s a problem.. Tom has these flashbacks or dreams of this beautiful girl and is troubled by the idea of leaving Earth (his home) – he gets on with his usual stuff, repairing droids and has some run-ins with scavs where he gets to show-off how badass he is and how super badass the drones are when called-upon to bail his ass out of some trouble..

anyways, there’s a lot of flitting around the planet in his little dragonfly ship and hanging out in his Bespin cloud-city apartment with gal-pal Victoria.. everything’s cool, clean and functional with the same form-follows-function look like Kubrick’s 2001 or Moon..

then thing’s get a bit mental and i don’t wanna give anything away but in the end it’s quite interesting if a little derivative of a certain aforementioned movie and then a whole lot of others.. by the end I wasn’t really sure what happened and it all got a bit silly but that’s big-budget sci-fi for you isn’t it?

It’s funny though, watching this making-of clip – they airlifted 50 people and a ton of gear up to that remote clifftop to get a shot that then they embellished with CGI anyway.. seems like more of a ego-trip than a necessary way of getting that shot – after all, it didn’t look real with those immense machines in the distance anyway so why not do the whole thing in a computer? – but hey I’m never really into CGI.