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Movie Review: Oblivion

rottentomatoes.com

Friday's "Go!" section in the Eagle said some things so generic to current movies that I have half a mind to make a rubber stamp of it to use as a template for future reviews.

It said of Tom Cruise's new movie Oblivion that it is "stitched together from spare bits of other, often better films... it stumbles awkwardly in story and plot... (and) subsequent twists and turns verge on the ridiculous," but "is surprisingly well acted and... beautiful to look at..."

I wouldn't care to list how many movies I've seen lately that that describes.

But I don't think it is entirely fair to Oblivion.

The postapocalyptic world Oblivion shows, in the real Iceland, is even more desolate and forbidding than usual for post-disaster movies, with a ghastly beauty compounded largely of horror.

But Oblivion is more consistent, and even clear, than the movie business currently requires. Unless I missed a whole lot that I wasn't even aware of missing, there is just one quite believable switch in plot and point of view, plus some questions of loyalties.

Even the question of how many people could possibly be shipped off to one of Saturn's moons does not disturb when you consider how many survivors of the scavenger wars there seem to have been. And the agents of government act as reasonably as we expect movie governments to act-- maybe a little more reasonably.

I really didn't have much trouble with the plot of Oblivion.

And the space-pod vehicles were so wonderfully evil-looking as to verge on the comical. There's maybe a little more swish-swash-boom-crash with these vehicles than we really need, but this is, after all, sci-fi... and it's only in 2-D.