Tom Cruise’s Oblivion

Oblivion is yet another movie about a world where the bulk of the earth’s population has been wiped out and a handful of survivors with virtually no chance of beating a vastly superior enemy-uh wait, that’s a lot closer to the end.

We start off with Tom Cruise and a cute British woman with over-sized pupils going about the routine business of sucking all the water off the Earth’s surface so it can be shipped off to Titan, a large moon orbiting Jupiter.

There are pockets of aliens hiding here and there that sabotage the equipment and Tom has to go out and repair it.      Tom is Tech number 49-and it never occurs to him that there might be, oh say, 48 other Techs running around somewhere.  His British companion is a stickler for the rules and does her best to keep him in line.  They are a very effective couple who seem to work and play well together.  There is the small problem that Tom has dreams that feel like memories of the word that was.

Oblivion is a great looking film with nearly flawless special effects-this is due in large part to the fact that there are very few scenes that  feature things that need to be whipped up entirely with CGI.  Yes, there are a lot drones and ships and whatnots-but computers do a phenomenal job of rendering that kind of stuff.  I had no problem with the believablity of Tom’s drones. habitat,  and  helicopter thingie.  Computers suck at organics-especially moving organics-such as Jar Jar Binks and all such ‘characters’ from the past twenty years or so.  I’m mostly alone in hating that kind of animation-as the monster success of Avatar proves-but I was happy to see none of it here.

Oblivion has a good lead in to the meeting with Morgan Freeman and the remnants of humanity-a scene that loses much of it’s punch thanks to its being featured in the Trailer.  There are a few other shockers along the way to the finial scenes-many of them predictable and a bit familiar to the veteran sci fi film buff.   But it was all good, the story was not so familiar that it was boring and not so original that it was baffling.

Tom Cruise is one of the last of the old school Hollywood movie stars, he pretty much plays Tom Cruise in every film-and I don’t have a problem with that.  Tom carries most of the weight in Oblivion and his supporting cast does a good job with the little they have to work with.

I liked the ending of Oblivion, though it did leave at least 99 questions unanswered.

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