Tom Cruise and Joseph Kosinski’s Top Gun: Maverick is the biggest hit of the year by a mile, racking up over $1.3 billion at the box office to secure a place as one of the highest-grossing movies of all-time, while near-universal acclaim has also seen it justly deemed as one of the finest blockbusters of the modern era, with a Best Picture nomination at next year’s Academy Awards looking likely. As a result, fans have taken to revisiting the duo’s first collaboration on Oblivion in their numbers.
By the standards of both big budget sci-fi and Cruise star vehicles, the ambitious epic was fairly underwhelming on both the critical and commercial front. It was far from a flop after earning $287 million on a $120 million budget, nor was it panned as respective Rotten Tomatoes score of 53 and 61 percent will attest. Instead, it was kind of just… there.
The visuals are regularly jaw-dropping, and Cruise is as reliably solid in the lead role as you’d expect, but Redditors have been placing Oblivion under the microscope almost a decade on from its initial April 2013 release to reassess and reappraise the existential intergalactic adventure.
Up until Maverick knocked everything out of the park, Kosinski was regularly labeled as one of the best visualists in Hollywood, albeit one who failed to bolt a satisfactory story onto his unbridled creativity and imagination. Oblivion does fall into several of those traps, and it devolves into generic action movie territory at points, but there are some interesting thematic elements, stunning vistas, and emotionally-charged undercurrents to be found throughout.
Will Oblivion go down in history as a classic of the genre? Almost certainly not, but it may be a lot better than many people remember it to be.