Bouldon anyone who gets out of line. It is just a tired reboot of the old imperial
fantasy of control from above. It can be traced through nineteenth-century
science fiction about airborne anarchists and dirigible dictators, and through
Winston Churchill’s bombing of Iraqi Kurds; it can be seen in the fruity
fascist overtones of the Wings Over the World global law enforcers in
Things to Come (1936), and in the Strategic Defense Initiative first advocated
by sundry SF writers and then by Ronald Reagan; and it can be seen in
the murderous drone program overseen by Bush, Jr., Obama, and Trump.
And it can be seen in Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion (2013), which is
pretty much alone among contemporary alien invasion movies in imag-
ining beyond empires to Empire. In the film, the aliens came sixty years
ago. They destroyed the Moon, and gravitational upheavals devastated the
world. Then they invaded. Humans nuked them and won the most pyrrhic
of victories, rendering Earth uninhabitable. The survivors abandoned the
world and colonized Saturn’s moon Titan. They left behind a network of
monumental airborne machines to suck up the remaining water to power
Titan’s fusion generators (or something nonsensical like that), a drone
defense network, and a maintenance worker, Jack, played by Tom Cruise.
After sundry action shenanigans, Jack discovers that the deadly Scavengers
intent on sabotaging the devices under his care are not remnants of the
alien army but the last surviving humans, forced underground.
Jack, you see, has been played. There were no swarms of extraterrestrial
warriors. Just millions of mind-wiped clones of Jack, the astronaut who first
encountered the Tet—a giant, tetrahedral AI—in space. And this Jack,
the one we have been following, is not the original Jack. He is just another
clone deployed to accumulate for the Tet. A figure of Capital and Empire,
the Tet is detached from the world, instrumentalist, without allegiance to
anything human or terrestrial. It merely extracts. Wrings dry. Moves on.
There are no monsters. Just the monstrous system of Empire.