Lifeless trip into oblivion

Rating: 4/10 (28 July 2013)

What kind of expectations do you have when Joseph Kosinski, the creator of Tron: Legacy announces a creation of a post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie with a budget around 120 million and the movie will be starred by Tom Cruise and Morgan Freeman? My expectations were high because the movies like this rarely disappoint you. But unfortunately this movie did that.
Tom Cruise in the role as Jack is just terrible to watch. The actor that once shined in Minority report is now as stone faced and bold as Nicolas Cage in Wicker Man remake. He doesn't manage to create any interaction with any of the characters in the film. Same with Andrea Riseborough as Victoria. There was no interaction or emotion between those characters, not good or bad, it just felt like they were reading their lines from the paper. Olga Kurylenko and Morgan Freeman were the ones who managed to point out from the characters lacking all depths but unfortunately it didn't save anything because their characters were written so badly, lacking all depth.
Instead of limitless possibilities how to use the sceneries of eerie and post apocalyptic earth and its abandoned cities, the only thing we will see is a lifeless, CGI desert. In the poster we can see Jack walking on a collapsed bridge with an eerie, beautiful background. This is something we won't see even single time in the real movie. Where Mad Max and Star Wars films managed to create stunning visions of deserted planet, this movie gives the audience just vain piles of sand over and over again. Few scenes with the CGI forests and the nature are as lifeless and dry as the scenes on the CGI desert. Same goes for the scenes in tower 49. Instead of million ways what kind of visual appearance or small details it could have had, it is nothing more than a gray, dusty headquarter with nothing that could catch the eye of the viewer.
The plot itself is nothing special, nothing that we wouldn't have seen already. Still it might be the strongest aspect of the movie and the only reason why the lifeless movie doesn't collapse completely.
I fear the crew and the director calculated that a gigantic marketing for a science spectacle in post-apocalyptic earth, directed by the creator of Tron: Legacy and starred by Tom Cruise would become a hit and pay itself back in no time no matter how flat the movie itself was. And that is most likely what the movie will do in no time.
The sad truth is that after all the hype the only thing we see is a mainstream Hollywood movie with a mainstream plot filled by low-quality acting and low-quality sceneries directed to mainstream audience with low-quality tastes.
A movie that will fade into oblivion in few hours after seeing it.