Oblivion ** – Oblivion is an incoherent, desolate regurgitation of previous sci-fi films we know and love.

It’s 2077, aliens have invaded Earth and blown up the moon which has resulted in cataclysmic disasters, leaving the planet a wasteland. Tom Cruise is Jack Harper, a scout and repairman, who is one of the last remaining humans on the planet along with Victoria(Andrea Riseborough).We are lead to believe that the remaining humans are repopulating on a nearby moon called Titan.  Cruise’s character is completing his final missions to despatch the last remain hostiles on the planet. Andrea Riseborough is meanwhile back at HQ, a sky tower, assisting Cruise on logistical matters - all the while, Cruise is having dreams and reveries concerning a women(Olga Kurylenko) he has yet to meet.

The best you could say about the film is that it has an interesting colour palette – it is cold and grey and visually quite arresting to look at. Also, Andrea Riseborough does the very best she can with little to go on, delivering insubstantial lines with a certain degree of weight and her performance is a hell of a lot less self-conscious than Cruise’s. Every moment Riseborough is on screen the film is just about held together by her performance and actually the potentially sparse character drama between Cruise and Riseborough’s character works initially. However the film starts to crumble under its utterly incomprehensible plot. Much has been made of the fact that the film riffs on other sci-fi’s of the genre and I could fire off a list; it’s a bit Star Wars, a bit I Am Legend, a bit like The Road, The Fifth Element,The Man Who Fell to Earth, Wall-E etc. The character drama between Kurylenko and Cruise owes a debt to Stephen Soderbergh’s Solaris, but it has none of the depth of Solaris, and indeed it is as though they wanted somebody as charismatic as Natascha McElhone in Risborough’s character – but that doesn't really pay off either. Oblivion is also very long and slow and at 124 minutes, you do feel the time drawing out because of the nonsensical plot simply leaving you unengaged.

However, I think that Oblivion does want to be a film of ideas and it does have ambitions to be an intelligent sci-fi film – it just fails. When Morgan Freeman turns up, he is given nothing to do and the film loses its way even further. What could have been initially an arresting and engaging drama descends into an emotionless, frustrating mess of ideas and bad script writing.