I saw Oblivion (feat. Tom Cruise). It was infuriating!

the movie did not live up to the promise of the cool poster :(

My favorite way to go into a film is with as little prior knowledge as possible. I knew nothing about Oblivion before I saw it. Scratch that - I think I had seen one trailer and it vaguely reminded me of I Am Legend, so I was expecting zombies. (Spoiler alert: there are no zombies in Oblivion.) 

Anyway, I walked into that theatre tabula rasa and came out REALLY MAD. CAPSLOCK MAD. I don't really know what happened plotwise in Oblivion. What I understood was basically that there were some aliens (possibly just one big robo-alien with a glowing red HAL eye?) in a triangle spaceship who needed to suck water up from planets to convert it into energy for a reason that was never disclosed to the audience aaaaand there were a lot of Tom Cruise clones running around. 

It was a mess, but the fact that that didn't bother me is indicative of a much larger problem. And here is where the feminist critique of Oblivion begins. None of the women in the film had any agency whatsoever! Their entire lives revolved around Jack Harper (Tom Cruise), or were otherwise Not Their Own. There are three women with speaking roles in the film: Victoria (Jack's teammate/lover/sharer-of-really-sweet-house-in-the-sky), Julia (an astronaut and Jack's wife pre-invasion/pre-memory wipe), and Sally (Jack and Victoria's mission controller stationed on the Triangle Spaceship). 

Here are the fates of all the women!:

Victoria: Jack realizes Julia was his wife before he had his mind wiped. Jack and Julia share an intimate moment, which Victoria accidentally witnesses. Victoria apparently cannot function with another woman in the picture so she becomes homicidal! She tries to kill Jack but mistakenly gets killed instead, and that's her miserable whole story arc. I guess we're not supposed to feel bad for her because she was a rule-adhering wet blanket throughout the rest of the movie. And the inexplicable naked swimming pool scene didn't do much to convince me of her and Jack's chemistry, so it's probably okay she was unceremoniously killed off, right? Nope. 0/10. Try again.

Julia: If we compare the writing process to baking cookies, the recipe for Julia was there, but it's like someone read "flour" on the ingredient list and instead thought, "OH I'LL JUST THROW IN CRIPPLING POWERLESSNESS INSTEAD." That was a rough comparison. But Julia could have been a badass! She was a NASA astronaut, for God's sake! But for half the movie she's either stuck in a sleep pod or mortally injured or sitting in Jack's little ship waiting for him to come back. At the end of the film, Julia suggests that they both go up to the Triangle Spaceship to blow it up together in a fiery symbol of martyrdom and everlasting love, probably. And we're led to believe that Jack takes her up with him (in the sleep pod, obvs), but it's revealed that Jack has instead brought up rebel leader Malcolm Beech (Morgan Freeman) to exact his revenge on the Evil Triangle Spaceship. Jack's actually dumped Julia-pod off in the woods to, conveniently, wake up after she can do anything about it. The thing that really took the cake, though, was the moment when Julia finally got a gun in her hands and was pointing it at a drone that was about to take out everyone in the room. Picture it: Julia's been coddled by Jack the entire film and she finally finally gets 1) a Big Gun, and 2) the opportunity to do something really cool and save a bunch of helpless people. What happens? She gets scared and drops the weapon! Luckily, though, A Man comes to the rescue!!! Sykes (a zero-dimensional character played by Nicolaj Coster-Waldau who is capable of so much better shame on you) shoots that drone dead, and Julia retains her utterly useless character status. 

And Sally ends up being the adopted persona of the sentient Triangle Spaceship, her true form having assumedly been killed off years earlier.

This film repeatedly and unrelentingly denies women agency. The men decide what is best for them, and they are never allowed an opportunity to stand up for themselves or have a moment of glory or strength. Heroism is reserved for the men. The men fly the ships, the men hold the guns, the men destroy the Evil Triangle Spaceship. The women are relegated to sleep pods or a control desk, while Tom Cruise and Morgan Freeman get to fly around and do all the cool stuff. Victoria watching Jack go off on his drone repair missions every morning felt like a 50s housewife waving goodbye to her businessman husband from the front porch of a ticky-tacky house. This is sci-fi - and I know I keep going on about this - but we have an Evil Sentient Triangle Spaceship and the writers, with all their wonderful imagination, could not fathom a woman who could shoot a gun or decide her own fate.

This is 2013, y'all. Women do not need Tom Cruise to take care of them.