movie thoughts … Oblivion

So I saw this with the wife this evening … I was actually looking forward to it since I first saw the trailer months ago, and ultimately I would still argue that roughly half of the movie was still pretty good. Without getting into spoilers, I guess it just hit a point about halfway through the movie where I literally said out loud in the theater, “What? Oh, come on…” and it was downhill from there…

I did like all of the post-apocalyptic landscape – I think they did that well, and I thought their tower in the sky that Jack & Victoria lived on was a neat concept to distance themselves from the crazy back down on the surface. I’m kind of a fan of the whole post-apocalyptic thing in general, so it’s always interesting to me to see how different filmmakers envision life on Earth after an end of the world-type event.

It’s really just the story itself that took an unexpected twist that I thought felt kind of cheap and overdone, like I was expecting something monumental and instead, it was like, “Really? That’s the big mystery behind this whole thing? Oh…” By the end of the movie, it just kept spiraling for me to the point where it almost felt like the finale from another movie had been dropped at the end of Oblivion by mistake … it was that underhanded that I was surprised to be watching it on screen … it was like everyone just clocked out in the last act of the movie, which is too bad because like I said, up until about the halfway point it was really a pretty decent movie until it turned into a nosedive!

Even just walking out of the theater, I already had an alternate plot line for the second half of the movie that at least didn’t buy into the same overused “twists” that ended up being the downfall of this one. Seeing Tom Cruise shooting guns and jumping through explosions was fun and all … it just would’ve been nice if Hollywood had asked me about their script before calling it a day so that they could get the ending right on this one… 😉