Looks good, but the story's not great

Rating: 5/10 (28 January 2016)

OBLIVION is a great-looking addition to the wave of serious science fiction movies that have been filling cinema screens of late. It has wonderful vistas of a post-apocalyptic Earth, and although the screen is often full of CGI effects, they're handled very well and the overall result is a beautiful-looking movie.
A shame, then, that all of the money and the visuals are wasted a little on a storyline that turns out to be rather clichéd and predictable. OBLIVION takes a number of well known sci-fi tropes and mixes them all together in a somewhat unsatisfying mess; you know from the very outset the sort of thing that's going to happen here, and sure enough it does. It doesn't make for much in the way of entertainment, even if it is good spectacle.
Tom Cruise stars in the usual everyman hero type role he's well known for, and he's not bad here; but none of the actors are required to do a great deal, which is a shame when there's genuine talent in the supporting cast. Morgan Freeman plays Morgan Freeman, Nikolaj Coaster-Waldau gets all of two lines, and Andrea Riseborough and Olga Kurylenko both look arresting but play rather one-dimensional characters. By the time you reach the second hour of this slow-moving production, all of what transpires will have been well telegraphed in advance, leaving this a somewhat hollow viewing experience.