Oblivion (2013)

• Action
• Adventure
• Sci-Fi

For speculative-fiction fans, the least interesting part of any modern science-fiction movie is its final act. The opening of films like Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion tend to be about world-building, about creating a future and establishing its rules. The second act lets the characters explore and make significant decisions.

Tom Cruise and Andrea Riseborough star as a placid couple living in a spectacular, spartan glass-and-steel spire in the post-apocalyptic ruins of New York City. As Cruise establishes in a tediously overstuffed opening monologue, aliens called Scavengers, or “Scavs,” attacked Earth 50 years ago, and the battle to drive them out left Earth ravaged and unlivable.

In spite of a hushed, heavily oversold opening monologue, co-writer/director Kosinski takes his time in unfurling Oblivion’s world, from Earth’s stark, abandoned, IMAX-friendly vistas to Cruise and Riseborough’s relationship. Oblivion shines in the moments that are least crucial to the plot, as Cruise explores a thunderstorm in his sleek futuristic personal conveyance. An unsettling sense of not-quite-right coats all of the film’s steely surfaces, and Kosinski and his co-writers give audiences plenty of time to prepare for the action.

Oblivion is a terrific-looking movie, alternating spare, sterile environments with homey organic ones, and making both look tremendously pretty. Kosinski also handles his action well, with cut-and-dried clarity and edge-of-seat energy. And while the story developments heavily echo other science-fiction films—some classic, some recent, but all earlier to the finish line on these particular plotlines—Kosinski and his screenwriting partners wind them into the action effectively.