I like the style but not the substance

Rating: 5/10 (23 September 2013)

Disappointing sci-fi actioner by Tron: Legacy director Joseph Kosinksi, yet another one of those flicks that seems to think that having Tom Cruise in every single scene makes for a good film in itself. This time Cruise plays a military veteran stationed at a small base up in the sky, from where he and his female co-worker (Andrea Riseborough) oversee and conduct repairs on a vast network of drones, which is used to safeguard giant machines scouring the planet of its last remaining natural resources. After all, we are talking about a post-apocalyptic Earth here, ravaged by war between humanity and some alien species, that witnessed most of the planet becoming uninhabitable to human life. Therefore, mankind left the planet and settled elsewhere, leaving Cruise and his drones as a sort of worldwide mop-up crew (think Wall-E). Or so Cruise thinks. His world is turned upside down soon enough when he encounters an underground force of human rebels who fight to preserve what's left of their planet under the command of Morgan Freeman (who unfortunately has much too small a role; he deserves better and so do we). The ugly truth is revealed when it turns out Cruise is the true alien evil and there's hundreds of duplicates of himself, an army of clones engineered by extraterrestrial intelligence to stripmine the planet while being unaware of the real facts, just hoping to soon complete their job and go home (think Moon). Of course the real bad guy – a giant super computer with its own nefarious agenda (think I, Robot) – won't allow Cruise to switch sides so easily and thus a rather boring fight ensues between the rebels and the drones. Despite the sometimes intriguing premise of the main character finding out his whole life is a lie so he needs to reinvent himself, existential questions about the nature of the self are briskly ignored in favour of monotonous action scenes involving guns, bikes and funky aircraft, all of them seemingly designed by the Apple Corporation, considering the film's over-reliance on slick, white, minimalistic looking technology. After a while, shots of Cruise flying around in his little helicopter get exceedingly tedious. At least the spectacular Iceland vistas do not, nor do the grand sights of famous (digital) architecture left to rot in desolate landscapes. And it is gratifying to see Hollywood jumping on the 'creepy drone technology' bandwagon so quickly (though it will probably brand the movie as 'soooo 2013' in years to come). But despite a few points in Oblivion's favour, it can't be helped this film is simply dull and derivative.