Tom Cruise is now considered almost an infallible element for the box office. But the millionaire and dizzying of his most successful films, such as his ‘Mission: Impossible’ or the brand new ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ does not mean that he also has lesser-known films that, in many cases, are worth recovering. It is the case of this ‘Oblivion‘ what just landed on HBO Max.
‘Oblivion wasn’t a box office flop, but With its budget of 120 million against a collection of 287, its benefits were more adjusted than on other occasions. And it is not because Cruise was precisely a newcomer to science fiction: only a year later he would shoot ‘Edge of Tomorrow’, and in his filmography there were already such important titles as ‘The War of the Worlds’ or ‘Minority Report’ ‘.
Here we travel to 2077, on an Earth destroyed after a war with aliens, which has forced Humanity to move to Titan. Cruise is a technician sent to that uninhabited Earth to service the drones used in the fight against the remaining aliens, and those they call scavengers. He will soon have to face a strange new alien threat.
Although in its final stretch, ‘Oblivion’ has to show off its status as blockbuster at the service of Tom Cuise, he has an amazingly placid initial stretch and where all his strength resides. Places and scenes that are recognizable but desolate after the conflict (in the style of the iconic image of ‘Planet of the Apes’), credible future technology and production design that moves away from blockbuster to usage. The good narrative pulse of Joseph Kosinsky, with whom Cruise has repeated in ‘Top Gun: Maverick’, is noticeable: especially if you are one of the few but very select fans of the remarkable ‘TRON: Legacy’
