Trailer
Plot summary
In 2077, Earth lies in ruins after a war with the alien Scavs. Humanity has moved to a colony on Titan, leaving technician Jack Harper and his communications partner Victoria in a tower above the planet to repair the combat drones that patrol it. Jack dreams of a woman he cannot place and secretly visits a green valley where he has built a cabin. When a signal leads him to a crashed spacecraft, drones destroy the other pods it carried, and Jack shields the one holding the woman from his dreams. He brings her pod back to the tower, where Victoria revives her. The woman is Julia, and Victoria reports her arrival to Sally, the mission controller on the Tet.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Oblivion (2013)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Jessica Chastain was cast as Julia opposite Tom Cruise, but when she was offered the lead in Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty, Cruise released her from her Oblivion contract so she could take it; the role was recast with Olga Kurylenko.
- The Bubble Ship flown by Tom Cruise's Jack was a real 25-foot, 4,000-pound aluminum prop built by Camarillo concept car company Wild Factory, with joystick and pedal placement customized for Cruise, a qualified pilot who gave input on the design.
- The hardest scene to film was when Harper stops to admire the view and waters a flower. Tom Cruise sat beside an 800 foot drop at the top of Iceland's Jarlhettur on the root of Langjokull, reachable only by helicopter.
- For the Sky Tower set, Joseph Kosinski and cinematographer Claudio Miranda used 21 front-screen projectors aimed at a 500-foot seamless white muslin backdrop wrapped 270 degrees around the set, lighting up to 90 percent of it and avoiding bluescreen that would have erased the glass house.
- To create the illusion that the Sky Tower set sat high above the clouds, Digital Domain sent a crew to film from the peak of Haleakalā in Hawaii for four days using three Red Epic cameras on one rig, then stitched the data into a single video stream.
- Joseph Kosinski's Oblivion graphic novel was never finished or released; he used the years of artwork and story development as a pitch kit, saying the story was always intended to be told as a film.
- Tom Cruise announced before the Hollywood screening that Oblivion was the first feature mixed completely from start to finish in Dolby Atmos surround sound.
