Oblivion

Directed by Joseph Kosinski
(PG-13)

**

“See Oblivion for its look, but don’t expect anything more,” said Rene Rodriguez in The Miami Herald. Set in 2077, decades after an intergalactic war rendered Earth a radioactive wasteland, the film is often “visually mesmerizing” as we watch a lone human couple—played by Tom Cruise and Andrea Riseborough—police the nearly uninhabited planet on behalf of many other survivors who’ve relocated to a distant moon. Ostensibly based on a graphic novel by director Joseph Kosinski, Oblivion instead feels “more like a nonsensical mashup” of better sci-fi films, including Wall-E, The Matrix, and Star Wars, saidJoe Williams in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. When Cruise’s character rescues a woman who’s been appearing in his dreams (Olga Kurylenko), his sense of identity gets rattled, but none of the questions raised by Oblivion proves “especially deep.” Yet this would-be blockbuster is so unconventional in its structure that “at times it feels like a five-character play taking place in a digital-effects lab,” said Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune. Even so, “there’s not much energy to it.”