A dog's breakfast - soulless and incomprehensible

Rating: 5/10 (18 April 2013)

Take a mega-millions CGI budget, a charismatic superstar and a post- apocalyptic sci-fi theme and you may come up with a movie that's as thrilling as TOTAL RECALL (the Schwarzenegger original, not last year's crap remake) or as mystifying as INCEPTION - or you might just come up with a dog's breakfast like OBLIVION.
I wish I could tell you the storyline but it defeated me. In a not-too- distant future, Earth has been devastated by aliens who have left pea- shaped flying gunships to eliminate the last few survivors (cue Morgan Freeman in a small and thankless role). The alien Mothership is a kind of giant jam puff run by Sally, a female version of our old chum HAL. Tom Cruise plays Jack Harper, a roving repairman employed (don't ask why) by Sally. He lives in an aerial penthouse with a see-through swimming pool: not the Ideal Home for anyone with a fear of heights. He has a female companion (Andrea Riseborough) who's a bit like a Stepford Wife, but then he rescues a mystery woman (Olga Kurylenko) from a crashed spaceship and begins to question his role on this ravaged planet and the history of its destruction. Are you still with me? To be honest, I'm not sure I'm still with me!
Without Tom Cruise OBLIVION would be a turkey: he gives this soulless movie a human dimension and makes its incomprehensibility just about endurable. The story, we're told, comes from a graphic novel, but it seems little more than a mishmash of borrowings from the last 55 years of sci-fi: from 2001 through THE TERMINATOR and TOTAL RECALL to WALL-E. The CGI is seriously thrilling, but this visual feast is, like I said, a dog's breakfast.