Review of Oblivion (2013) by Alex M — 14 Sep 2014

Visually and action wise, this movie delivers the goods. Unfortunately, the story is kind of stupid especially so because it's a sci-fi movie. I was digging the slow creepy build up to what was coming, but its ultimately wasted when the reveal comes and becomes a dumb action movie with an overhanded plot twist. Sure, it's better than 90% of the sci fi movies Hollywood puts out today, but it was definitely not the breakthrough sci fi movie everyone was calling it, and certainly not Tom Cruise's best in recent years.

Tom Cruise and Andrea Riseborough carry the movie in the beginning, effectively making us question their roles together. He then goes into hero action mode not even 30 minutes later when he meets Morgan Freeman's stuffy underground leader character, not at all interesting or satisfying to watch. Freeman phoned this role in completely, I wouldn't be surprised if the goggles were added so that he could be sleeping 90% of the time during filming from boredom. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is reduced to a bit part, and I'm amazed how annoyingly irrelevant his character is to the overall story. It's at a forced moment during a battle scene that he saves our lead character, which really comes out of nowhere, character motivation wise. The guy was an asshole and had a chip on his shoulder against Tom Cruise's character the whole movie.

And quite honestly, I had even forgotten that Olga Kurylenko was in this movie, so that shows how memorable her character was to me in the story.

Kosinski, you got the visuals down, but please don't write anymore and pick your scripts with actual character driven stories.