Living in 'Oblivion' is Unoriginal

In 2017 the Moon had been destroyed, and Earth attacked, nearly wiped out completely, by aliens known as Scavs. Oblivion takes place in the year 2077, where two of the few humans left on the planet - Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) and Victoria (Andrea Riseborough, the British girl with the side-swiped futuristic 'do and crooked teeth) - work as an effective team of security and drone maintenance, their memories of a past Earth wiped. Director Joseph Kosinski (TRON: Legacy) adapted the sci-fi based on his own unpublished graphic novel of the same name. Jack Harper's place of salvation is a lake house which is somehow still intact after the destruction of all Earth surfaces. In this solace, Jack pulls out his New York Yankees ball cap, dons a flannel shirt, and pops on the vinyl - it is all very heavy handed. There are ways to portray the notion that Earth is severely missed sans the hyper-American "artifacts." Nearing the end of Jack's mission, he comes across a crashed spaceship called the Odyssey, where he rescues Julia (Olga Kurylenko), who has been in hibernation inside a sleeping capsule. Jack's flashes of memory on a pre-Scav Earth connect him to Julia. Without giving away any spoilers, I can tell you that Earth will be fought for. As a sci-fi nut, I find that Joseph Kosinski's biggest mistake is hiring Tom Cruise. Cruise is poison for the believability of a Post-Apocalyptic world. I can, though, give Kosinski some credit for his bleak snowlike-toned atmosphere, and for the actual construction of Cruise's bubble ship. However, M83's film score aiming for epic sci-fi proportions works against it, as well as the often cheesy screenplay. According to the director, Oblivion pays homage to 1970s sci-fi. Really? Because the main element of the film (which I cannot spoil) is taken directly from a 2009 sci-fi immeasurably better than this one, Duncan Jones' Moon. There are shots in Oblivion which scream 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Blade Runner (1982), and a scene that features a wall of cryogenically cocooned beings ala The X-Files: Fight the Future (1998). Science fiction must bring something new to the genre, after all, it does base itself in the future, be it near or far. Earth may be a memory worth fighting for, but so is science fiction.