“Oblivion” should be an intriguing sci-fi that shows us things we’ve never really seen before. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to ignore the numerous plot points that are stolen right out of plenty of other (better) sci-fi movies. It’s definitely not any kind of revolutionary piece like “Blade Runner”, “Metropolis” or “Dark City”

In “Oblivion”, Tom Cruise (“Mission: Impossible”, “Risky Business”) stars as Jack Harper, who along with his partner Victoria, maintains robot drones that protect large machines that turns water into energy. This all takes place supposedly after aliens invaded Earth, the planet has been nuked countless times and the rest of humanity lives on Saturn’s moon Titan. However, Jack is going to find out the truth about what really happened.

Cruise is average at best in this film. I thought Mr. Cruise would be better at picking sci-fi pictures to do after he did the truly magnificent “Minority Report” but here, he has done something with hardly any originality. I was sad to see Morgan Freeman (“The Dark Knight Rises”, “March of the Penguins”) has very small amount of screen-time because he’s by far the best actor in the film. The other characters in the film are really boring and that’s another reason to dislike the film.

You may remember I didn’t really care for “The Matrix” and that’s because the so called ‘new’ sci-fi seen in it had already been done in both “Star Trek” and “The Twilight Zone” (in the 60s). That just copied ideas from the past but “Oblivion” copies a lot of the presentation of other work. It looks awfully like “WALL·E”, it then clones quite a few plot elements and visuals from “2001: A Space Odyssey” and the original “Planet of the Apes”. This film should have been a captivating sci-fi but sadly, we can only appreciate the action sequences because we can’t fail to notice the picture’s copycat nature.