movies: oblivion

oblivion: earth is a memory worth fighting for
As a general rule, I'm over Tom Cruise... the last Cruise movie I saw was Mission Impossible 3 back in 2006.

But I'd heard good things about his newest movie, Oblivion, so I figured it might be worth checking out.

I'm not necessarily going to say that it wasn't worth it... but it did feel very much like I'd seen large chunks of this movie before.

It's Planet of the Apes, it's The Matrix, it's Wall-E, it's Moon, it's Independence Day, it's Dark City... it's rife with tropes that you know you've seen hundreds of times before. And I'm not saying that the movie treats these ideas that have been used in 101 other movies badly, but it doesn't really feel like it does anything new with them, so it all feels very familiar, and often quite predictable.

It's a movie where I worked out the basic idea behind the movie within the first five minutes during Cruise's opening monologue, and was constantly working things out well before the answer appeared on screen.

It's also a movie where the trailer pretty much spoils large chunks of the film.

And I have to say that I was disappointed with the very end of the movie.

Cruise is his usual action movie self... although there seems to be much less running in this movie, but then he is 50 now. And there were also a couple of highly distracting Cruise (fully clothed) crotch shots that I'm not sure were strictly necessary.

But I can't help but feel that Andrea Riseborough steals a large portion of the movie... or maybe it's because she's the only other person around for the first third of the film. She is good though.

She's certainly better than Olga Kurylenko, who just seems to wander through the whole movie with the same dazed expression on her face.

It's also a good looking movie. The effects are beautiful and there's a lot of beautiful scenery (most of which is probably digital).

On balance it probably leans more towards the side of good than bad, there just isn't a whole lot that feels new here.

yani's rating: 2 cabins out of 5

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