

&amp;#8216;Oblivion&amp;#8217; Review: Tom Cruise Meets &amp;#8216;Tron,&amp;#8217; &amp;#8216;Wall-E,&amp;#8217; &amp;#8216;The Matrix&amp;#8217; &amp;#8230;

While a case could be made that the warmed-over “Oblivion” will make the boldest anti-drones statement of any fictional film this year, it’s a chilly movie that never draws you in 




Tom Cruise opens the film with a head-spinning torrent of exposition, but it boils down to this: It’s 2077. Sixty years earlier, alien invaders wrecked the moon, destroying much of Earth. What was left of the planet got trashed by nukes used to fight off the E.T.s, and now most of the population lives on a moon of Saturn.




One day, Jack happens upon the top of the Empire State Building, which the Scavengers are using as a homing beacon; following the coordinates being sent out, he finds a crashed spaceship, but the passengers aren’t aliens — they’re humans. And one of them is the lady from Jack’s dreams.

This discovery sets in motion Jack’s new understanding of who he is and what has happened to Earth, and “Oblivion” might have worked better if it weren’t so proud of these revelations that most audience members will figure out long before the characters do.

Kosinski is great with the doohickeys — Jack’s transport, his fold-up motorcycle, that house of the future — but neither the plot nor the characters click the way they should. (And I say that as someone who actually liked “TRON: Legacy.”)

Cruise has to spend most of the film playing a literal blank slate, but even after he starts filling in his own memories, the character remains as vague as ever. And poor Morgan Freeman, who turns up late in the film, gets saddled with some astonishingly clichéd dialogue. (That YouTube reel of characters in dozens of movies saying the line, “You look like shit,” just got three seconds longer.) M83’s score is mostly effective, but even it feels unoriginal, like the love child of Daft Punk’s “TRON: Legacy” music and the “Inception” BWAAAAH.


The stink of studio notes and focus groups pervades throughout, in fact — that awkward narration at the beginning shares information that Jack offers up again later in the film; one imagines a test audience complaining that they didn’t understand what was happening, and the studio deciding to overlay all that clunky exposition up front. Just a theory, but I’d put five bucks on it.

If the dialogue and the concepts of “Oblivion” had been as fresh and powerful as its art direction, we’d really have something here. Instead, it’s something borrowed packaged inside something new.