Movie Review: Oblivion
Oblivion stars Tom Cruise as one of the last men on earth in a desolate, apocalyptic future. This has been done so many times now, to varying degrees of failure and success (mostly failure), that the entire concept seems tired. But lucky directly Joseph Kosinski, who’s only other credit is the masterpiece ‘Tron: Legacy,’ has a few tricks up his sleeve to try and keep things interesting. There are twists along the way that are often unintentionally funny, and the soundtrack is reminiscent of really awful 1980’s science fiction. How the studio didn’t catch that in their focus groups is beyond me.
Of course this is all about Tom Cruise, and he deserves some credit here. He’s like 65 years old by now and still looks like he did in ‘Top Gun.’ The sad thing is that I think this is the first movie that Tom Cruise has short hair that I didn’t like. If you look at his history, almost every movie that he has long hair is lame (MI: II, Vanilla Sky, etc…) and almost every movie he has short hair is pretty good (MI: I, Minority Report, etc…). So this movie has broken a long-running trend in his career.
I didn’t hate this movie, and the ending was decent (but a bit confusing). I don’t want to give anything away, but it involves a lot of really bad CGI work. As nice as computers are, they are still no replacement for good old fashioned movie sets and props. You can usually tell when something was animated by a computer. Freaking George Lucas!
Anyway, I don’t think this movie’s very good, but my wife loved it, so who knows…