Great sci-fi adventure

Rating: 8/10 (4 May 2013)

I rather enjoyed this movie. I found the story to be intriguing and the film beautifully made. It particularly excels in showing us future technology and a devastated world. Cruise's performance was superb. The movie has a couple of neat twists, but I don't want to give them away.
It continues to amaze me that filmmakers can produce movies with such incredible special effects. The special effects in this movie are indeed spectacular.
If I have any complaint, it's that the film caters too much to those who go to the movies to see chase scenes and shootouts. For about 5 minutes, the movie actually morphed into a video game.
Also, it annoyed me that Morgan Freeman was in this movie. He can be great at times, but he is grossly overexposed. I almost considered not going because of his presence.
The current IMDb score is inexplicably too low. I checked out a few earlier reviews to see why. Reading some of these reviews, it seems that the lower scores hinge on three factors: (1) the presence of Cruise; (2) the similarity to other movies; and (3) lack of realism.
It seems there are some people who atavistically dislike Cruise and wish he would abandon Hollywood and stop making movies. I get that. But regardless of what you think of Cruise, he remains a talented actor; he shows here he can easily and convincingly play the lead role in an action-adventure movie. (Come to think of it, I cannot think of a recent movie in which Cruise has not excelled.)
It's more or less impossible now to produce any movie that does not remind moviegoers of earlier films. All movies are derivative, to a certain extent. And to give this movie a "1" for that reason is unfair. This movie is absolutely not a ripoff of "Moon". There was one similar plot device. That was it. And even if movies are similar, so what? References and allusions are standard in any medium or genre. They give a movie depth.
Some reviewers have dissected the movie to look for aspects that are less than completely realistic. However, I noticed none of their points while watching the movie. It all worked for me, and if something is truly unrealistic I notice it immediately. There was nothing that was so jarringly unrealistic that it ruined the film for me.
I'd go see this one.