Disclaimer: I was completely uninvested in Oblivion and only saw the first trailer before the movie. I came into the theatre with no expectations at all. That said...
THIS MOVIE GAVE ME CANCER
This is the first time in years I've wanted to walk away from the cinema. It's just as simple as that. The first half of the movie is actually pretty solid and competent, even if it's nothing spectacular, but everything crumbles right after Cruise
. By the time Kurylenko shows up the film crashes right into the ground. It goes from fun sci-fi flick to a straight collection of tropes barely held together with the thinnest plot-tape I've ever seen.
It is just a collection of set pieces and clichés from a thousand flicks before, all of them intertwined to create a "new" movie. There are bits of The Matrix, ID4 and countless others all over the place, but the worst part is that those scenes are so damn lazily written and so poorly directed that you can help but notice how goddamned
amateur the script is. Everything is just so trite and derivative. The final 30 minutes or so are just so goddamned poor.
On top of that, Oblivion may be the one of the most inadvertently sexist movies in recent times. Kurylenko sole role is that of a walking
, whereas Andrea Riseborough (the only actor who didn't phone it in... even if at the end of the movie
) only exists to look pretty for the camera. It's seriously ridiculous and at points disconcerting how useless are all the female characters in Oblivion.
On a more technical level, Oblivion is almost as barren as the Earth it depicts. The aesthetics are interesting at first, but the camera work is completely unimaginative and pedestrian, while the soundtrack is every bit as derivative as the rest of the film. Unremarkable at best. The song after the credits was the only decent part, and I can't even remember much of it.
Verdict: Save your sci-fi monies for Elysium.
