a poor dollars spent / movie quality ratio

Rating: 5/10 (6 April 2014)

I actually quite like Tom Cruise and am not a Cruise-basher, I also like sci-fi, but this movie failed for me on a number of counts
The pacing is bad and there is no build up or developed back story, instead the audience is thrown straight into the middle of it all. It's obvious very early on who the bad people are going to be and where things will end up, and because Oblivion is also quite long, things get boring
The special effects are nice for the most part, but the drones get repetitive after a while. it has some nice sound, but really nothing exceptional. It reminded me a little bit of Lost in Space from 1998, big budget bland sci-fi
There are some badly wasted actors such as Nikolaj Coaster-Waldau (Jamie Lanister from Game of Thrones) who is given about 2 lines to speak, the ultimate crime in my opinion because he would probably be a better lead than Cruise himself
The female lead Olga Kurylenko is extremely limited and one dimensional, and spends most of her screen time glaring at Tom Cruise like he is some kind of god figure
Oblivion tries to be everything at once.. complex sci-fi conspiracy movie, action, romance, but ends up lacking in all departments
There are so many better things to watch in this genre both on the big screen and on TV, including the previous Cruise/Sci-fi outings Minority Report and War of the Worlds, both are better than Oblivion. Overall Oblivion was a wasted $130 million endeavour