Search, Recover, Destroy

Rating: 6/10 (21 April 2013)

Thankfully Tom Cruise, as Jack, repeats the backstory of OBLIVION somewhere in the middle section – it's all part of an progressively intricate plot that gets a tad confusing when a new character is introduced into the contained vessel where Jack and his partner Victoria are a team sent to, as the description goes, "extract Earth's remaining resources." This has to do with recovering and fixing damaged drone devices sent down to take out any rogue scavengers. And it all happened because some alien force blew up part of the moon, causing the elements to destroy most of the Earth.
The drones are lethal orbs that only respond to Jack's voice recognition. The coolest scenes are in the beginning as he either flies around or rides a high-tech motorcycle, putting the irritable machines back into working order. Then the plot thickens when one of the drones almost kills Jack, who eventually discovers survivors in the murky underground, led by Morgan Freeman's wise and/or crazy old man, Beech.
It wouldn't be fair to delve any further into the storyline since so much relies on tricks and turns and, of course, that important element all films post M. Night and LOST have to acquire: the twist ending or in this particular case, several twist middles, turning an exploration based sci-fi into a Film Noirish love story: the main character risks everything to help a damsel in distress, who, with a few secrets of her own, shuffles the deck even more.
That's when things get clunky and the inevitable final battle (the first of two climaxes), involving a horde of hell bent drones, is a more expensive, digitalized version of the MAD MAX universe. And this isn't the first cinematic similarity: the main setup, of a "worker" cleaning up after an abandoned Earth, borrows from Pixar's computer animated WALL-E and, well, we won't take away points for unoriginality but for throwing too many cooks into the mix – all with very similar features.