Diverting... if you don't think about it too hard.

Rating: 6/10 (1 September 2013)

Oblivion is well-produced, pretty, and well-acted by all its principals, and it features some reasonably suspenseful action sequences. Under the hood, it's also derivative, shoddily constructed and ultimately nonsensical.
So, one possible method of enjoyment is to just try to keep yourself from thinking too much about how its pieces get together. Fail to do this, and you might notice (severe spoilers):

It is never satisfactorily explained why the villain-creature of the piece -- an unsubtle cross between the monoliths and the HAL supercomputer both stolen from 2001: A Space Odyssey -- needed to expend so much energy and effort sucking up Earth's oceans. Why not just go to Mars which has ice-caps and no extant civilization to contend with? The technical explanation we're given is "power," but how much power is it expending to do what it's been doing for fifty years?

It is never really explained why the villain-creature of the piece needed human clones to do its bidding. If it can build sophisticated automated drones, why can't it build other machines to tend them? Why did it even need an army of clone Tom Cruises to conquer the planet, as recounted by Morgan Freeman (whose character, I see from the credits, was supposed to be named Beech)? The only explanation for this in sight is the Grandiosity Clause that Cruise must surely have in his contract: the plot as constructed makes him the most important human in the universe, on whose decisions depend everyone's survival or destruction. Frankly it feels a bit forced.

I get that Jack Harper was supposed to have residual memories because they'd somehow been embedded in his genetic code or something by cloning, but I feel like we're getting to the point where SF movies can start acknowledging that this is Not How Memory Works.

If you can overlook the above, the cast and director really do manage to wring some pathos out of what essentially is a mish-mash of hand-me-down premises, and Oblivion is visually impressive to boot. Will never be a classic but it's not completely awful.