Any Film + Tom Cruise = Top of the box office

Rating: 6/10 (23 April 2013)

'Oblivion' is the latest Tom Cruise movie that is currently doing extremely well in both the US and UK box offices. Tom Cruise is – for some reason – one of those actors who will attract the masses to a film no one would otherwise care about.
This film however is a film people will genuinely be interested in seeing regardless of Tom Cruise. Joseph Kosinski has written a fairly solid story here; it has been a while since there has been a decent sci- fi film out that hasn't been linked to a film or book series. However, the film does seem like Moon, Total Recall, The Matrix and 2001: A Space Odyssey rolled into one. There are points in the film where nothing really happens, this does not mean they should have replaced them with action sequences, because there were a decent amount of them and they were very well done. There were way too many flashback scenes that were very boring, they showed the same flashback almost a dozen times but with no extended parts that taught us anything, it was literally the same scenes over and over again. There were a lot of instances where I was bored but it was not all the fault of the writer.
Tom Cruise and Olga Kurylenko are the blandest pair of actors ever it would seem. Andrea Riseborough's performance is fine; her character was supposed to be quite cold and tries her best here. Cruise and Kurylenko have no chemistry whatsoever and you simply do not care what happened to them. This is where the major flaw of 'Oblivion' was noticed; the story was pretty good, the effects and props were amazing – though it would seem aliens have discovered Apple – and the sets were just fantastic and really interesting to look at but the actors were just too dull! Morgan Freeman gave the best performance, his most interesting one in a while, but unfortunately had next to no screen time.
Overall, 'Oblivion' is not a bad film. It was clearly made by someone who has a love and respect for sci-fi but it could have been so much better had two other actors been given the lead roles.