Movie Reviews: "Oblivion"

[JamesG]

Movie Reviews: Oblivion


Even most critics who slam the script for Oblivion, the sci-fi blockbuster starring Tom Cruise, concede that the movie looks spectacular.





Consider the judgment of Peter Howell in the Toronto Star:

“Certainly there are no qualms about the visuals. Writer/director Joseph Kosinski confirms his flair for the fantastic that he brought to TRON: Legacy, another film that pleased the eye better than the mind.”





Claudia Puig in USA Today puts it this way:

“It’s a dazzler, but the story lacks the impact of the futuristic look.”





Kyle Smith in the New York Post comments that the film has all the markings of a contrivance by a “successful hack screenwriter” — someone who believes that “originality requires too much work.”

Yet Smith goes on to write: “Not that Oblivion isn’t kind of fun; there are lots of zippy flying scenes and an adequate quantity of shootouts. Simply counting up the various ripoffs is a fun drinking game, and the effects look cool, or at least costly.”





Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal concludes that what this sci-fi flick demonstrates more than anything else is:

“a future in which the theatrical movie medium is dominated by productions that are ever richer in high-tech visual arts and ever more impoverished in the art of telling a story.”





Yet Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times writes that it:

“has the ability to haunt you visually and, with an unanticipated love story, even emotionally.”





Michael O’Sullivan in the Washington Post calls it “an engrossing, if complicated and twisty, story, with plentiful sci-fi action and a provocative subtext about the nature of the human soul.”

He adds that it “requires some mental effort. This is not a movie during which you should fall asleep. Fortunately, there’s not much chance of that. Oblivion is fast-paced and exciting.”





Joe Neumaier in the New York Post writes that Cruise:

“dials down the intensity, making his character a low-blood-pressure kind of hero. … Cruise has a knack for knowing how to make things work.”





But Manohla Dargis in the New York Times oddly spends a good 60 percent of her review commenting on the “fading” stardom of Cruise and concluding sternly:

“You not only have to ignore the din of the tabloids and swat away the buzzing generated by his multiple headline-ready dramas, you also have to come to grips with the harsh truth that it no longer actually matters why and how Tom Terrific became less so. No one else much cares.”

-IMDB News