Oblivion – The Soul of Humanity Wins

This movie powerfully illustrates what I call the Soul of Humanity vs. the Soul of Animals. Whichever one triumphs will determine the survival of all life on earth, and yet, this conflict mostly plays out between an individual man (Tom Cruise) and the wife assigned to him.

Ignore the critics, they lack the maturity to understand this movie. Even the folks who made it lack the maturity to understand this movie. We know this because if they really understood, the movie would have been even better. They just got lucky.

Oblivion, and the role played by Tom Cruise, should remind you of Gladiator and the role played by Russell Crowe, or Equilibrium and the role played by Christian Bale.

You will not see the plot twists coming.

As the story begins, the main character, Jack Harper (Tom Cruise), tells us that 60 years earlier, an alien race began a war to exterminate humans and take the earth for themselves. Humans won the war by using all the nukes, which rendered the earth uninhabitable.

It is now 2077, and no one lives on earth except for Jack and his wife Vika, who are finishing up their five-year earthside mission. Their job is to maintain the drones that protect the giant fusion reactors that are sucking up the oceans in order to power the human colonies on Titan. The reason they need the drones are because a handful of aliens remain on earth and are trying to sabotage the power generators. The only other surviving humans live in the giant mission control space station that gives Jack and Vika their orders.

Mission control erased the memories of Jack and Vika at the beginning of the mission so that if they were captured by the aliens, they could not reveal that information.

From the beginning we can sense that something is not right, and this feeling only grows throughout the movie as the evidence mounts. In fact, the future of all life on earth depends on Jack and Vika figuring out the truth and doing the right thing. However, one of the things we begin to learn right away are that Jack and Vika are two very different people. Jack is curious, adventurous, and courageous; whereas, his wife is very nice - as long as she is in her comfort zone.

Whenever anything out of the ordinary happens, Vika is fearful, small minded, petty, spiteful, jealous, etc. She wants nothing more than for her and Jack to rejoin the others on Titan. She has never violated a rule. She has never left their amazing apartment that sits on a mile high pole. She has never been to the surface of the earth. She has never met another human, She has never met an alien. She would place her life and the life of her husband at risk just to avoid hearing any evidence that might cause her to leave her comfort zone.

Vika's is the poster child for passive aggressiveness and normalcy bias. She is holding Jack back.

In a world of epic threats and epic deceits, Vika is convinced that she is doing the right thing, and that Jack must conform. She is too closed minded to change.

Likewise, back in the real world, we too face epic threats as well as epic deceits, and it is people like Vika who are holding back progress. They are preventing us from moving forward because they are too closed minded. They are convinced they are doing the right thing, and that the rest of us must conform. They include all of those who voted for Mitt Romney, but worse than those are the ones who did not vote, and the most closed minded and delusional bullies of all are those who voted for Obama.

I know, that is 98% of America, so that probably includes you, but you could have voted for the Libertarian Party, or the Green Party, or written in Ron Paul. You could have contributed to their campaigns. You had a choice.

Given the recent scandals and how both parties are determined to go into Syria, some of you are now very sorry and promise to never vote for a media-approved candidate again, if not, then you are still one of the assholes who is killing the Soul of Humanity.

You still have a choice. The world is the result of our individual choices. It is never too late to become the person you want to be. Some of us just figured it out sooner than others. You will be forgiven.