It's okay...it's okay

Rating: 7/10 (20 April 2013)

I saw this in IMAX, so it was very big and very loud. It also seemed a bit long, somewhat predictable, but not boring.
A simple story line creates a typical Tom Cruise scifi action vehicle, differing from Vanilla Sky and Minority Report by employing far fewer supporting roles, fewer props, and bland featureless CGI backgrounds. Essentially a mash-up of Wall-e and Zardoz, with major visual, thematic, and sequence nods to Star Trek, Star Wars, Alien, Matrix, Inception, Adjustment Bureau, Mad Max, Terminator, Total Recall, Armageddon...yeah, it's pretty short on original elements. There's even a bit of Jerry Maguire and Top Gun here.
Still, what emerges is a story, Hamlet or Oedipus, bent to accommodate a fairly happy ending.
SPOILERS: There are a few plot devices that jar, like how the flight recorder continued to monitor the command module after separation, or the unexplained discrepancy in the fertility of Julia and Victoria, and why do the drones, which are clearly presented throughout the film as independently fueled and autonomously programmed, fall out of the air instead of continuing their attack? These issues knocked me out of the story, but since the illogic is revealed late in the film, the damage is contained.
Morgan Freeman does a credible turn in a limited roll that is just a bit more passive than one wishes. Andrea Riseborough does some real acting, though it's mostly acting suspicious. Her character is actually developed too much for the purpose of the plot, and an opportunity to acknowledge her Ophelia antecedent with an aquatic mishap is missed. And if Victoria is overdeveloped, Julia, played by Olga Kurylenko, is little more than a prop. Really, a little less of Tom figuring it all out, and a little more of Olga, maybe listening to the flight recorder she was so determined to recover, would make the ending of the film more emotionally satisfying. Again, a bit too passive to engage.