Oblivion Review

I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I was kind of excited for Oblivion. I thought it looked like an interesting and original sci-fi film. The trailers looked reminiscent of some great Philip K Dick stories, so yea...I got my hopes up. I wasn't expecting anything phenomenal, but was expecting a pretty decent, well scripted sci-fi film...sadly that's not what I got. 

Oblivion is literally a mashup of a couple of recent (and original!) sci-fi films. It draws greatly from Moon (one of my favorite sci-fi films of all time, let alone the last decade) and Daybreakers (which was a great twist on the vampire genre, especially in the wake of the awfulness that is Twilight.) It you can imagine what those two movies would look like mashed up...you might see a, conceivably, good film. Sadly, this film takes two great storylines, but fills it in with absolutely crap. 

The biggest problem with this film is definitely the writing. Whoever wrote this didn't have a single original idea in their head. They pieced together a couple of great sci-fi plots, but couldn't connect them well enough with their own originality that it all fell flat. And the dialogue was absolutely abysmal. Everytime a character spoke, I wanted to vomit a little bit. Now, when I say the movie wasn't "original enough," I imagine a lot of you are going to complain about how most movies nowadays aren't original, as they are remakes or adaptations. But this is a whole different story. This is a movie that claims to be original, but just regurgitates other movie plots...and poorly at that. I wasn't even a tiny bit surprised when I found out the writer also directed the horrendous Tron: Legacy. 

Other than the script, the rest of the movie was fairly mediocre. The acting was nothing special, but not awful at all. I was really disappointed with how little they used the best actors in the film, those being Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (aka Jaime Lannister) and Melissa Leo. It focused far too much on the less talented people (sorry Tom Cruise fans, but he's been going downhill for a while now.) I also wouldn't have minded a little more Morgan Freeman, even if I did find his character's dialogue to be the worst...but that's might just be because I have a man crush on his voice.

The direction for movie wasn't very good. This movie had a lot of opportunities to wow us with some stunning shots of a war torn Earth, but it didn't capitalize at all. Instead, it just threw a ton of obviously CGI'd landscapes at us and expected us to find it amazing. I really think that if this movie had included some large set pieces, or maybe even used some biggatures, it could have had some impressive shots, and really impressed a lot of people. Instead, we get the guy who did Tron: Legacy, who just loves CGI, apparently. He went crazy with this movie, and it was really disappointing.  

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This movie suffers from poor writing, it's really that simple. The acting was nothing special, and the direction was pretty bad, but the bland, unoriginal script stood out as the biggest failure for this film. I think a better life decision would be to sit down and watch Moon and Daybreakers back to back instead of wasting two hours on this film.

Writing: 3/10

Directing: 3/10

Acting: 5/10

Pacing: 5/10

Rewatchability: 3/10

Score: 3.8/10