Last night I finally caught up with Oblivion on DVD. Oblivion has a pretty solid and reasonably compelling story idea, laid out in the film’s initial narration: 60 years ago, Earth was attacked by aliens who were beaten through the use of nuclear weapons but at the cost of destroying the Earth. As a result, Earth’s population is moving to Titan; Tom Cruise and Andrea Riseborough are a two-man team servicing attack drones protecting enormous machines that are in some way processing Earth’s water for the relocation (there are still some aliens around, making trouble.) Tom Cruise is an actor who usually picks entertaining scripts and always gives a solid performance, and this film is no exception. The story evolves in a pleasing and somewhat unexpected way, and it has a pretty satisfying and well-crafted ending.

So why didn’t I like this movie more? Although the story idea is compelling, the execution of the story is off. It feels unfocused, uninspired, even a bit superficial at times. The narrative has some cool, surprising ideas in it, but their impact is strangely muted. The set-up is adequate, but the pacing is definitely on the slow side (the film feels very long,) and the dialog is not great, both of which make the story much less gripping than it might have been – Oblivion comes across as more than a bit dull compared to great Sci-Fi films like Sunshine, or this year’s Europa Report. Making things worse is the decision to include several boring and overly-long battle scenes of people versus drones, scenes that were entirely unnecessary, and which frankly bring the pacing of the film to a complete halt. Visually, all aspects of the film look rather fake and unpleasing. The music is completely generic.

Then there’s the casting. I was surprised that cheese-master Morgan Freeman was actually pretty decent in this film, even though he looked ridiculous in the preview. But Tom Cruise comes across a little flatter and more wooden than he usually does (I think it was the lack of dialog.) And Olga Kurylenko, though nice to look at, comes across quite a bit worse than wooden or flat: I found her completely unbelievable, almost devoid of emotional resonance, and given her central role in the story, that wound up being a pretty serious problem. Andrea Riseborough (the Shadow Dancer gal) gives a solid performance, but she’s not working with much here – most of her lines are just boring, logistical jargon spoken into a radio, stuff like “Roger that, Com,” and “Request drone diversion to the area to investigate.”

I enjoyed Oblivion, but I’d never need to return to it again, and I must say that for such a cool story idea, it’s disappointing that they somehow managed to reduce its impact to a (good) summer popcorn flick.