Verdict:
There’s a trope in action movies: two people fight over a gun and the gun goes off, accidentally hitting someone important. When two characters were fighting in this movie and a third person was watching the fight from relatively far away, the memory of that trope crossed my mind, but I thought that, certainly, this movie is much smarter than that. Sure enough, moments later it is revealed that the observer got shot. Even worse, this person, who stood there the whole time, was unaware of being shot until the plot was ready to move on.
See, the visual presentation and the potent sci-fi soundtrack in Oblivion make you feel like you are watching something original and intelligent. The machines, the buildings and the architecture have a clean bright minimalistic look. Sweeping sunny shots of the barren Earth are impressive. The film has a widescreen attitude.
As the movie progresses, however, you realise that what you have here is a Frankenstein’s monster, patched together from a number of other older movies and games (Portal specifically), wrapped in a plastic package to appear new, while the story is not well thought out.
As the story progresses, it raises a few important questions that never get answered, thereby creating plot holes that make the plot appear unrealistic and unintelligent. Oblivions has a narrative issue somewhat similar to that of The Matrix, where the plot leans on a premise that is illogical and does not withstand scrutiny, while the big plot twist succeeds only in revealing the implausibility of the premise.
And while this is not a very wordy movie, the dialogue that is there is not great. There is a lot of exposition through talking instead of showing and there are meaningless one-liners that are only there because they sounded cool in someone’s mind.
Tom Cruise always delivers, and this is no exception. He and the talented supporting cast are carrying this film as far as they can. They prolong the illusion that you might be watching something good.
Oblivion goes from a seemingly interesting and promising science fiction film to a disappointing action flick. It does look good all the way through, so at least there is that.