The problem is that the world 'Oblivion' introduces - an abandoned, depopulated Earth - is more interesting than the story it tells. It's a smart technique for science-fiction storytelling it eases the viewer into the world of the film. The film's opening stretch is its one strong point - a gradual, immersive build-up of details.

It also creates one of the movie's more glaring logical errors, but that's a different story altogether. It goes without saying that the flight recorder unearths all kinds of secrets about Harper, Vica, and the alien invasion. The astronaut has been in cryogenic sleep for the past six decades but refuses to disclose the nature of her mission to Harper and Vica until they recover her flight recorder. This incites jealousy and suspicion from Vica, who is both Harper's partner and his lover. He manages to rescue one survivor, a Russian astronaut ( Olga Kurylenko) who looks exactly like the woman in his dreams. One day, Harper spots an antique spacecraft crashing into the countryside. In order to maintain the integrity of the mission, Harper and Vica's memories have been wiped nonetheless, Harper is haunted by extremely cheesy black-and-white dreams of a beautiful woman meeting him in pre-invasion New York. Their boss, the creepily cheerful Sally ( Melissa Leo), supervises them from an orbiting control center. Harper and Vica spend their days fixing drones, eating candelit dinners, and swimming in a glass-bottomed pool. Like Olivia Wilde's Quorra in ' Tron: Legacy,' she often resembles a marionette. Harper lives in a penthouse-like tower with his communications officer, Vica ( Andrea Riseborough).

Harper and colleagues remain as technicians, servicing robot drones that defend resource-gathering stations from alien stragglers. The other survivors have long since relocated to Titan. Cruise stars as Jack Harper, one of a handful of people left on the planet. 'Oblivion' is set in the year 2077, 60 years after an alien invasion rendered the Earth largely uninhabitable. It features shiny surfaces, clicky machinery and no recognizable human behavior. It starts slow, turns dull and then becomes tedious - which makes it a marginal improvement over the earlier film.

Like director Joseph Kosinski's debut, ' Tron: Legacy' (2010), 'Oblivion' is a special effects extravaganza with a lot of blatant symbolism and very little meaning.

Oblivion a rusty key