Oblivion Reviews
Bloomberg News
as Jack Harper, Cruise, at his wrinkle-free handsomest, fits perfectly into Kosinski's worlds -- both the soulless universe of 2077 and the emotionally beige movie of 2013.
Examiner.com
This is one that we'll basically have to write off as a missed opportunity. It looks great and is mildly interesting at times, but in the end, there's just not much that's particularly memorable here.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
CraveOnline
Cobbled from so many familiar sci-fi classics that every single plot point is clearly visible from a mile away.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/10
Schmoes Know
It's a noble attempt to focus on a love story within a blockbuster sci-fi summer movie; it's too bad that love cost us the chance to have a fun ride into the future.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.9/5
Schmoes Know
It's a shame the story can't live up to the incredible visuals.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.8/5
The Popcorn Junkie
A great introduction to the sci-fi genre if you've been living in a nuclear fallout shelter since the 1950s. For those more familiar with the genre, it's an elaborate sci-fi theme park ride
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
Slant Magazine
Absent of any sense of self-awareness, Oblivion seems only self-serious, a ponderous mess both misguided and unaware.
Full Review
| Original Score: .5/4
Top CriticKosinski continues to lavish far more thought on how his elaborate fantasy worlds look than how they work, and neither the politics nor the human stakes here coalesce into rational or relatable drama.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
You start wondering whether director Joseph Kosinski and screenwriters Karl Gajdusek and Michael DeBruyn have any original ideas of their own. And then you realize they don't.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
American Profile
The jam-packed storyline piles on themes and sci-fi clichés, pompously wraps them around an obscure Victorian era poem, then throws in an Andrew Wyeth painting for good cultural measure.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
Moviedex
An admirable failure; an overlong, awkwardly paced mishmash of cool but familiar ideas and all-too predictable plot-twists.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
What Culture
Oblivion is one of the best-looking bad films ever made.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
If nothing else, "Oblivion" will go down in film history as the movie where Tom Cruise pilots a white, sperm-shaped craft into a giant space uterus.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Scotsman
For all its dystopian sweep and moody posturing, Oblivion is too underpowered and underwritten to linger for long in the memory.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
This is London
Although the film is derivative and predictable, it nonetheless makes no sense whatsoever in the end.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Badass Digest
Like Tron Legacy, Oblivion is a beautiful, tedious, stupid movie that is an actual chore to endure.
If the dialogue and the concepts of Oblivion had been as fresh and powerful as its art direction, we'd really have something here. Instead, it's something borrowed packaged inside something new.
When you go to a futuristic, dystopian, post-apocalyptic barn dance starring Tom Cruise and his space guns, you expect a little zap with your thoughtful pauses.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
The mystery posed by "Oblivion" as a whole is why its mysteries are posed so clumsily, and worked out so murkily.
