Oblivion

Oblivion is an odd film.  What I mean is that you can tell the director is predominantly focused on the set design and world building. As a result, when forced to have a plot he just grabbed a bunch of cliches/tropes from other sci-fi films and just throws them out there to get a narrative flow/ending.  The blatant nature of this is actually kind of interesting as the set pieces are pretty much wholly lifted from other films (most glaringly Moon, the Matrix movies, and Independence Day to name a few).  I sort of appreciated how blatant the ripping off is and how uninterested the film was in doing anything other than letting Tom Cruise run around and fix drones. That part of the film (which makes up most of the first half) actually looks pretty great and its enough to keep you interested for awhile.  Eventually though the languid pace gets a bit tedious, and while its fun to play 'spot the other film this scene is ripping off' for a few minutes during the second half even that gets old after awhile.  Oblivion isn't worthless or unwatchable, it just never really engages on more than a technical level.  Which is more than I can say about the director's last film  Tron: legacy.

Few other random observations:
-The voiceover is really bad.  Again then this could be a direct result of nobody being that interested in anything other than the visuals.
-Morgan Freeman is in this for like five minutes, contrary to what the trailer would have you believe.

Gi Joe: Retailiation

Like the first installment of this series, seeing this was a pure nostalgia play.  Until they make a My little Pony movie, GI Joe is the one toy/cartoon from this current trend of lazy reboots that I have enough of a soft spot for to actually sit through a movie.  Even though I knew full well it wasn't going to be good (and make no mistake its really not).

Its not worth getting into all the plot holes (though I will say there is one sort of clever twist where Cobra gets all the other countries in the world to give up their nuclear arsenals) or illogical fighting (in the big Ninja showdown not one bad guy thinks to just cut the rope of our heroes) because you expect that in this sort of film.  What did surprise me is that I think there is a way to make  G.I. Joe film actually work.  If they just embraced the ludicrousness of a world where its perfectly acceptable to un-ironically only refer to people by their code names (Roadblock, Snake Eyes, Lady Jaye, etc), have no problem having prisoners get brought to your super-secret prison in full combat attire because the character can never be seen without their mask, or have the big enemy be a large multi-national corporation with apparently limitless resources run by this guy - then the whole enterprise could turn into a reasonably fun send-up of action films.  The film seems to realize this at moments (for gods sake they have the RZA cast as a blind ninja master, no way that's a serious move), but for the majority of the time it takes things way to seriously.  It should just embrace the inherant nuttiness of the universe rather than trying to 'tough' and 'badass.'  Though I did see the trailer for Fast 6, so there is that.