Oblivion is where this movie should be sent.

Akis, ME, Theresa, Thorsten, Matilde, David, Jeremie

A group of students and post-docs were going out on Friday night.  Dinner and a movie.  I joined them to go see the film Oblivion.  Mainly because it is opening here in Europe before opening in the US.  I have always wanted to be the first to see a movie, but I hate crowds and so I usually wait until a movie has been out a few weeks and then see it at a matinee.



We decided to have dinner first and go to the movie at 21:50 (9:50pm).  We ate at a nice restaurant which had a sampler plate that was piled high with 12 different items.  Three of us ordered the sampler and it came with enough for three servings of each.  Dinner took a while to eat and we did not leave the restaurant until nearly 22:00, but we only missed the commercials and most of the previews. The movie actually started twenty minutes after the posted time and other people besides us were still entering the a quarter full theater. Friday night on an opening weekend and only a quarter full. Maybe it is because this is a VO (Voice Original) english version, or maybe the other people know something else.

If anyone wants to see the movie Oblivion, it is more spoiled than the spoilers below, but I do talk about the plot.

OMG. That was the best filmed, crappy movie I have ever seen.  It was really bad. No, really, really, bad.

The director should never be allowed to film a movie again. Ultimately he is responsible for the whole movie, and the story sucked, there was no drama, there were no surprises, it was a complete rip off of other films.  People acting stupid (and stupidly), machines not acting in a logical or consistent manner.  Split screen with two human clones facing each other, supposedly pointing guns at each other, but one of the clones was looking somewhere besides where the other one was looking. The scenes were not connected, they looked like they were all made-for-TV video clips that were strung together into one continuous stream.  All of us agreed that the only thing we liked about going to the movies last night was the dinner.

Tom Cruise has the acting range of wilted cabbage.  The girl of his dreams (literally) tells him that she is his wife and he just looks at her?  At least he could have shown some emotion, like surprise, denial, laughing it off, or "Yes. I knew it", but, no, the actor and director just have him sit there with a stupid look on his face.  What was that suppose to mean?  If he had just completely ignored it and asked her what job she had before the war, it would have been better.  This director was only concerned with making nice special effects, into which he created some nice integrated live action and computer graphics, but so what.  The plot was so slow and sophomoric that it lost any credibility.  Tom had a nice souped up helicopter/jet and was trying to find a crashed aircraft.  After flying a little bit, he decided the only way to find it was by riding a dirt bike. Really?

I am not even sure that the actors were necessary for the story line.  Just needed lots of animated characters with a pretty CG "clone" machine running human integrated circuits.  Why even have humans?  The enemy had thousands of war clones waiting to kill off the heroes.  If the enemy had already blown up the moon, was scavenging the earth's oceans for their nuclear reactors, and had the technology to build these fantastic flying machines and weapons, why not just send them all down to the surface and shoot anything that moves on the surface?  They could have destroyed all the people and then got on with their business without any interference.  But then, how would they fleece you from hard earned money?

The women (or men) who like Tom Cruise will enjoy the multiple scenes where we had to watch him taking a shower or swimming in the pool.  Why do we need three scenes of him taking his shirt off and getting wet?

The scenes of him hanging on a wire, trying to act like he was weightless, seemed pretty bad. There were rip offs of the Star Wars scenes of flying in a narrow canyon and fighting off the bad guys.  Why would anyone go down into a canyon when they could stay above and just wait for the shot?.  It is just illogical, but makes for a pretty movie.

There was also a scene of human incubators, again, right out of the movies like The Matrix. The dramatic final Tom scene felt like a rip off from every sci-fi film - the tiny space craft enters a gigantic mother ship in orbit, such as Will Smith and Jeff Goldbloom in Independence Day.  Then, a meet-your-machine-that-thinks- it-is-a-god rip off from many other sci-fi films.

Morgan Freeman has about three scenes, which of course I liked, but they were not enough to even make this worth watching on video.

Oblivion is where this movie should be sent.