Oblivion retro review: is Tom Cruise’s sci-fi film underrated?

The 2010s were up and down for Tom Cruise. His Mission: Impossible franchise was successfully revitalized, but just about everything else — save for Edge of Tomorrow — has been pretty much forgotten. But should they have been? Considering that one of those movies, Oblivion, celebrates its 10th anniversary in April 2023, let’s examine it.

Oblivion is a sci-fi/action movie that stars Cruise, Andrea Riseborough, Olga Kurylenko, Morgan Freeman, Melissa Leo and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. The movie was Directed by Joseph Kosinski, who would later go on to direct Tom Cruise to much success in Top Gun: Maverick.

The Top Gun sequel proved that Kosinski and Cruise make a good team, so is Oblivion an underrated gem from the pair that should be given more respect? Before we answer that, let’s look at the key details about Oblivion, which will include some spoilers for the movie.

What is Oblivion about?

In addition to directing, Oblivion is based on a graphic novel story from Kosinski, which was adapted by by Karl Gajdusek and Michael Arndt. Here is the official synopsis for the movie via Peacock, where it is currently streaming:

“Before departing from a devastated planet Earth, a drone repairman rescues a woman from a downed spaceship, triggering a battle to save mankind.”

Giving a little more detail, the movie takes place in 2077. Cruise’s repairman Jack Harper explains in voiceover that an alien invasion took place around 2017. They destroyed the moon, which caused numerous natural disasters, and then launched a ground attack. He says nukes were used to win the war, but their devastation forced humanity to resettle on Saturn’s moon Titan, with key resources for their survival still being mined from Earth’s water supply.

That is what Jack and his partner Victoria (Riseborough) are doing on their five-year mission, protecting and repairing the machines that help with this from the last remnants of the enemy aliens still on Earth.

However, Jack finds a crashed ship with human survivors, one of which resembles a woman (Kurylenko) he has dreams about but has no other memory of. Later, he is captured by the enemy, only for it to be revealed they are human, continuing the fight against the enemy aliens who have manipulated Jack into doing their bidding. Jack’s search for the truth of who he is and what side he should be fighting for is the crux of the movie.

Oblivion’s most iconic moment

After learning that he has been lied to and wanting answers, Jack becomes the target of the drones he has been in charge of repairing. When a chase sequence results in him crash landing in what has been labeled a deadly radiation zone, he gets an even bigger shock: not only is the radiation zone not deadly, but he sees another version of himself, fixing drones in this area.

Jack soon learns that he is a clone, and the alien enemy has made hundreds (if not thousands) of copies of him to serve their purposes on Earth. But what makes this sequence stand out is not the reveal, but the fact that we get to see some Cruise vs Cruise action in a fun little fight scene:

The legacy of Oblivion

Despite Oblivion having Tom Cruise and being a big-budget sci-fi movie, it was not given the summer blockbuster rollout that you may expect. The movie hit US theaters on April 19 (a little earlier in many other parts of the world) and was greeted with a very mild shrug.

Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes (opens in new tab) has the movie scored at a 54% from critics, which gives it a “Rotten” score. Inkoo Kang (opens in new tab), writing for Screen Junkies, said “Ultimately, Oblivion is aptly named — no other movie so far this year has been so instantly forgettable,” while New York Magazine’s David Edelstein wrote “Was Cruise trying to beat out fellow Scientologist John Travolta for the honor of starring in the dumbest sci-fi epic ever?” Even the reviews that are labeled as “Fresh” didn’t exactly give the movie a ringing endorsement. Richard Roeper (opens in new tab) called it “the equivalent of a pretty damn good cover band,” and CNN’s Tom Charity (opens in new tab) classified it as “glossy, derivative, ambitious and fatally underpowered.”

Audiences at the time didn’t boost the movie’s reputation either. It earned $89.1 million at the US box office, which put it as the 41st highest grossing movie of 2013, below the critically-panned Armie Hammer and Johnny Depp movie The Lone Ranger. It did better internationally, earning $286 million globally, but it still earned less than movies like Smurfs 2 and G.I. Joe: Retaliation.

There have been those making the case that Oblivion is an underrated entry (opens in new tab) in Cruise’s filmography and harkens back to the type of sci-fi movies you don’t see as much anymore (opens in new tab). Now that we’ve re-watched Oblivion, here’s our take on whether those arguments hold water.

Is Oblivion underrated?

Tom Cruise in Oblivion

Tom Cruise in Oblivion (Image credit: Universal Pictures/Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo)

Short answer? No, not really. While we’ll give the movie credit for a cool, post-apocalyptic Earth look (it was filmed primarily in Vatnajökull National Park, Iceland) and its story has some twists and turns that can be engaging, Oblivion fails truly dive into its concept or characters.

There’s the old adage of show don’t tell, which Oblivion does not adhere to. Cruise opens with a voiceover monologue about what happened to Earth and why they are there, only to then explain it all again to Kurylenko’s character again when she arrives on the scene. Then, when the final twist of the movie explaining what happened to Jack is revealed, we’ve already basically been told by Morgan Freeman’s character. Sure, we get some added depth, but not enough to make the moment truly hit. Exposition can be necessary, but not when it is spoon feeding the audience stuff rather than trusting the story.

Beyond the story, the cast is going through the motions. Cruise is pretty flat and there’s no real chemistry with Kurylenko. Meanwhile, this is pretty much a waste of Morgan Freeman. The MVP is Andrea Riseborough’s Victoria, who is the only one that brings any kind of spark or depth to her character.

The best thing that we can say for Oblivion is that it failed so Top Gun: Maverick could eventually fly. Oblivion was Joseph Kosinski’s second movie and his first collaboration with Cruise. You can see some bits in Top Gun: Maverick that are reminiscent of Oblivion (mostly the sequences of flying through canyons), but everything is more engaging and in service of a stronger, more impactful story in the Top Gun sequel.

Is Oblivion a bad watch? It’s not the worst way to spend two hours if you’re looking for something new. And credit where credit is due, it is an original sci-fi idea, which yes, would be nice to see more of these days. But by no means does it belong in the realm of Tom Cruise’s better movies.