"Oblivion" Proves Cruise Is Not Always Smug And That You Shouldn't Judge A Director By Their Debut

Oblivion (2013)

I haven't seen an awful lot of promotion for this big-budget sci-fi film. However, it was pointed out to me by a friend and initially the director on the project made me rather sceptical. Joseph Kosinski's previous movie was none other than Tron Legacy (to which I gave a whopping D+ score).

The thing that intrigued me however is that this movie is actually based on a comic book that Kosinski wrote himself. Kosinski is not credited as one of the writers on "Tron Legacy". Now let's face it, normally a director does not begin their career with a big budget action movie. It's more common for them to begin with something smaller that they wrote themselves and then move on to personal projects afterwards.



Now "Tron Legacy" wasn't all bad. It looked great and the action scenes were really well-handled. In fact, I'd say that its biggest problem was the script. So to see Kosinski's new project was something personal to himself where he was keen to be directly involved in the screenplay, I had high hopes that this could be a marked improvement on his previous film.

On the other hand there's the lead character. I'm not really a particularly big Tom Cruise fan and the biggest problem I have with him is that I get seriously annoyed with him whenever he goes into "smug mode".

Last year I almost gave him a pass on "Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol" because he was essentially playing James Bond-esque figure and so smugness felt somewhat justified. That is, until it reached the final scene and his self-congratulatory smugness went into overdrive. Perhaps the only movie I've REALLY liked starring Tom Cruise is "Minority Report" and even there he still had some smugness to him.



Here we see a much more vulnerable performance from Tom Cruise. He doesn't have the same condescending feel to his performance that I normally expect.(Hopefully he'll be on similar form in Doug Liman's upcoming sci-fi film "All You Need Is Kill".)



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