It’s been a long while since my last SMEx, so I was pretty excited to find out I had a good reason to visit Oslo and extremely excited to find out this visit had lined up with the release of Oblivion. See, I’ve been looking forward to Oblivion since I first saw the trailer, I always enjoy big budget Science Fiction movies, as well as anything set in a post apocalyptic world.

Since I wasn’t in town long, we decided to have a pre-film BBQ, it was at the BBQ that I found out that no one else was quite as excited about Oblivion as me. In fact, quite a few SMEx’ers had very low expectations for Tom Cruise’s first SciFi film since the 2005 War of the Worlds.  After some delicious food, we decided to play some arcade games to decide who gets to ride in the car down to the cinema, and who has to take the bus. It’s been a long while since I played Street Fighter 2, and I was surprised at how many special moves I managed to remember. I’m also proud to say that I achieved the highest score on Donkey Kong, earning me a cramped ride to Colosseum.

The one thing that has stuck with me the most from Oblivion has been the soundtrack from M83. I actually found myself going out and finding it on Spotify, and i’m listening to it now as I write this review. We don’t often thing about OST’s when writing these reviews, but a great soundtrack can really make a movie. This one adds atmosphere, really helping to build the deserted world.

Visually Oblivion was stunning, I recently learnt that a lot of the backdrops from the Sky Tower were actually real Hawaiian horizons, which were projected onto the set, rather than green-screened in during post production. Allowing for better, more accurate lighting and real reflections in the set environment, hopefully we’ll see more of these kind of techniques in the future.

Oblivion is set in a future where we’ve had to abandon the Earth after nuking the planet to save ourselves from an alien invasion. All the humans now live on Titan but a few remain to guard the machines farming the seas for hydrogen energy. Jack Harper is one of the engineers on the Earth who is tasked with maintaining and repairing the drones that remain.

The story has some unexpected twists and turns, which are revealed gradually rather than all at once. This kept the story engaging and interesting even for the people with the lowest expectations!

Overall Oblivion was a solid movie, which will put high expectations in my mind on the other new SciFi IPs, After Earth and Elysium which are both coming up later this year! Hopefully my next visit to Oslo will coincide with one of these releases.

So, I headed to this movie after really feeling the effects of SAD – Seasonal Affective Disorder, or more colloquially, Pissed Off, Get On With Spring Already. I was feeling a bit flat and down. So what an unexpected surprise to find that there is a cure for POGOWSA: Random violence, men with guns, woman with guns, things that go boom – a lot – Hong Kong movie style martial arts, and all with a slightly silly and scant plot. Ah! I so want Firefly’s motorcycle from the opening bit … (Lissy dreams).

Not having seen the first GI Joe, sometimes I felt like I wasn’t sure what was going on.  But after talking to others later, I don’t know if seeing the first one would have made all that much difference actually since the story line tended to jump around a bit.  The story about the martial arts dudes just kinda popped up randomly and for a minute, I wasn’t sure it was the same movie. Very odd. As was the new “grand master” dude with the really unbelievable and crappy voice. Who is that? But, that said, ninjas are basically way cool and one of my favorite parts was ninja’ing (if that’s a verb?) all over mountain cliff faces on bungy ropes. In 3D this looked spectacular and since it’s the closest I’ll ever get to doing something like that, I got a vicarious thrill from it.

I think I have used the term “rollicking fun” before and I hate to repeat myself, but – it just was. Damn rollicking damn fun.

And I want Bruce Willis’ kitchen.