Oblivion isn’t the movie it deserves to be.

I went and saw Oblivion on its opening weekend this Saturday night, and even with a few days to process my thoughts, I still feel decidedly underwhelmed by the film. The problem, however, is that I’m not sure who to blame.

Oblivion on paper is a pretty intriguing setup for a sci-fi film. Set in the year 2077, long after a war between humans and an alien race known as the scavengers, the world is in ruins.  During the war, our moon was exploded, causing radical weather changes and rendering the Earth inhabitable   Those humans who survived left Earth to live on the moon Titan. In their stead, to help the cleanup process, they left one man to assist with a number of automated drones - Jack Harper, Technician #49 (Tom Cruise).  He spends his days working on the Earth’s surface, fixing drones, and his nights with his communications officer and girlfriend, Victoria (Andrea Riseborough), in a house in the sky.  But he’s haunted by visions of the former New York, and a beautiful woman he cannot place. Then one day, he discovers a crashed aircraft - containing the woman of his visions (Olga Kurylenko), and starts to question his entire existence.

The movie is beautifully directed by Joseph Kosinski (Tron Legacy), and hands down - were this a film of only visuals, it would be stunning and intriguing. Shot with Sony’s new CineAltaF65 camera, every frame of this is well composed and beautiful, and the effects are understated and genius - even if the drones may remind gamers of Portal.  The issue is, for all of this beauty? The film is as dumb as a box of rocks.

The script is built around two key twists, and I shall not reveal them for you here, but neither is performed with exacting precision.  The script is bogged down by unnecessary narration and continued repeating of key concepts to and from every character - the plot points are rarely allowed to play out without someone either explaining what is happening, or reminding us later what just happened. By the time that Morgan Freeman shows up as the leader of a rebel group of humans, you’ll practically be begging for the film to finally show you what happened, and not just tell you about it.  Were the flaws in the script the whole time? Or was Kosinski forced to add significant narration to the film? So much of what’s discussed within the dialogue was mentioned by the narration earlier - I could easily see this movie getting copious, Blade Runner style notes from the studio.

Even with a brisk for modern-day sci-fi running time of 2 hours and 4 minutes, and with characters explaining more than doing, the film still feels very slow and unengaging. It also does not help the scripts case that quite a few of the ideas presented were done better by recent films (Wall-E and Moon, for example).

To the films credit, it does feature a brilliant score from French shoegazer M83, so perhaps it would have made a great music video - in fact, I implore Universal to give us a “score-only” option on the eventual blu-ray - but the fact remains, for as much as I loved the look and the feel of the world, the story of Oblivion never gave me a chance to want to stay with it.  Make this one a Netflix rental at best.