Movie Review: Oblivion

After yesterday’s somewhat controversial post, how about something a bit more mainstream? Like a good ol’ movie review? Denisa and I had the chance to watch Oblivion the other day. Going into it, I didn’t know a whole lot about it. Tom Cruise. Post apocalyptic sci-fi. Go!

You really don’t need much more to go on than that, it turns out. The movie feels like they took a wide range of better films, stuck them in a blender, and jammed the Puree button down. You’ve got pieces of everything from Wall-E to Independence Day to 2001 in here, with some Sleepless in Seattle thrown in for kicks and giggles. In an ideal world, you’d end up with something greater than the sum of its parts, but this is a Tom Cruise starring vehicle, so . . . that ideal world never comes to fruition. I found a lot of the film to be fairly predictable.

The movie was diverting enough, but it failed to really soar to any spectacular heights–with the exception of the visuals. (Really, the movie is awesome in that department. You can tell a lot of work went into making these soar, and I’d argue it might well be worth the watch for that alone. Picking out the different New York City sites was a fun game to play throughout the movie.) In the end, I’d give it about 2.5 stars out of four, but I’m beginning to think I want to shift my rating system to a 10 point scale, since it’s easier to capture nuances with that. This movie would be about a 6. It would have been a 5, except for those wonderful visuals.

If you’re up for a better science fiction adventure, there are plenty of alternatives to choose from. Moon did what Oblivion wishes it could have done, for example. Anytime I watch an okay movie, it just makes me pine for those other movies that are so much better.