Screener by Kurt Loder

"Oblivion" is a light sci-fi snack of gently pre-chewed elements from other, meatier futuristic movies. Biding your time as these familiar tokens drift by — the "Blade Runner" identity games, the hovering white pods and menacing red HAL eye of "2001: A Space Odyssey," a half-buried urban landmark not unlike the one in "Planet of the Apes" — you think: Not bad, not bad. Then you go back to biding your time.

Tom Cruise brings his usual what-a-pro presence to this sleekly designed but otherwise unremarkable film. He plays Jack, a post-apocalyptic repairman on an Earth that was reduced to barren wastes and rubble during an alien invasion 70 years earlier. The rest of the human race has relocated to Titan, the main moon of Saturn, leaving a crew of overseers in a floating galactic headquarters to monitor planetary mop-up operations down below. Jack and his partner/sweetie Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) live in the last cool loft in Manhattan (or in the clouds high above it, anyway). Victoria, oddly togged-out in a tasteful cocktail dress, runs the control console while Jack jets off to work each morning, tending a fleet of armored drones that patrol the trashed landscape for pockets of evil, stay-behind aliens called Scavs. Seeing as Jack and Victoria both have been subjected to mandatory memory-wipes, this is the only life they know, and they're placidly content. (Question: If their memories have been wiped, how do they know their memories have been wiped? And seeing as they do know, why aren't they suspicious about it?)

Jack has been having persistent dreams about a familiar-looking woman he can't quite identify. When a time-traveling spacecraft plummets into his domain one day, he jumps into his snazzy neo-helicopter to investigate and finds that the only survivor of the crash is the woman, literally, of his dreams. Her name is Julia (Olga Kurylenko), and stranger still, she recognizes him, too.

Before long, we learn that the fearsome Scavs — led by Morgan Freeman in a black cape and steampunk goggles, flourishing a post-apocalyptic cigar — aren't what they've been made out to be. And not long after that, Jack begins to wonder whether anyone else is, either.

Director Joseph Kosinski, the architecture grad who concocted this story, has whipped up the sort of sleek CGI environments that are by now obligatory in this kind of picture. (Jack and Victoria's fabulous pad is so luxe that it even has a big swimming pool, perfect for PG-13 skinny-dipping.) However, the nifty digital confections here aren't quite up to the standard of the neon eye bath Kosinski provided in his first film, 2010's "Tron: Legacy." And though the movie's barren wastes — simulated in exotic Iceland — are pretty spectacular, at least as seen from on high, they're nowhere near as impressive down on the ground. Long before the picture passes the two-hour mark, our eyes have grown sated, and the story — despite all the requisite Cruisian action jolts — has leaked away most of the narrative verve with which it started out.

Cruise could play this kind of role in cryo-sleep, but his movie star magnetism and likability are what carry the film even after it starts to drag. Kurylenko (who also stars in Terrence Malick's "To the Wonder") is affecting beyond the call of hotness, and Riseborough is revealed to be an even snappier actress than was apparent in the 2011 Madonna disaster, "W.E." Also on hand are muscular "Game of Thrones" guy Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, as a renegade human, and the admirable Melissa Leo, as a floating overseer (trapped on a video screen throughout the film, unfortunately).

'Upstream Color'

If "Upstream Color" marked the debut of a freshly minted film school graduate, it might be dismissed as pretentious nonsense. Or maybe not. In any case, Shane Carruth, the 40-year-old Texan who did assemble this strange picture, never has set foot in a film school. A one-time software programmer with an obsessive interest in movies, he taught himself to write, produce, direct, shoot, edit, score and act in his own projects. Over the years since his only previous film — 2004's "Primer," a tech-talky sci-fi item made for $7,000 — Carruth wasted considerable time beating his head against the Hollywood wall before turning his back on the big time in order to maintain total control of his work. (He even is distributing this new movie himself.) The result is a picture that's baffling from beginning to end, at least on first viewing; but it's also woozily beautiful. And since Carruth is clearly no poser, I think we have to accept that this is the movie he really, really wanted to make.

The story ignores standard notions of comprehensibility. A young woman named Kris (Amy Seimetz) is abducted by a man who force-feeds her a liquid brewed from live maggots (or maybe some other sort of icky grub). He proceeds to drain her personality by making her hand-copy Henry David Thoreau's "Walden" in its entirety. When she tells him her net worth is $36,000 — all in coins, whatever that could mean — he proceeds to drain her bank account, as well. There follows an unexpected bit of pig surgery (pigs loom large in this picture), and then Kris finds herself back in the workaday world, now coinless and, after her extended absence, unemployed.

On a subway, she meets a man named Jeff (Carruth), whose own life is also a study in devastation. Then we make the acquaintance of another man, called — in the credits, at least — The Sampler (Andrew Sensenig). When he's not tending a large pen stocked with muddy pigs, this fellow wanders around with a small keyboard recording samples of odd sounds — rocks dropping in a storm drain, a file scraping metal, who knows why? Kris moves in with Jeff, who lives in a big hotel that appears to be otherwise unoccupied. Next come a bit of knitting, some business with a grommet machine, intermingled memories, many more pigs — the end.

Doesn't sound like a fun night out, does it? But Carruth's iron conviction that he's saying something in this movie is interesting in itself. (Even though, yeah, what could it be?) His cinematography, intently focused on skin textures (and the occasional insistently significant flower), is elegantly austere; and the editing (a collaboration with David Lowery this time) jumps in and out of time frames with an energy that tugs us along. All of this is bathed in Carruth's thick Eno-esque synth washes, which sometimes seem to be navigating a plot of their own.

But the movie's most appealing feature — apart from Carruth's smooth, broody performance — is Seimetz. An indie film veteran who's also a writer-director herself, Seimetz anchors the movie's dreamy proceedings with glimmers of real-world feeling. The more confusing things get the more of a pleasure she is to watch. In the end, even the equally befuddled pigs are charmed.

Kurt Loder is the film critic for Reason Online. To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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