I was expecting a lot of 'I'm Tom Cruise' and a loud, stupid-as-hell sci-fi run and gun action fest shot full of plot holes. Oblivion, in reality, is a smartly told film that makes good use of often overused cliches. The action scenes were fine, no blatant wank superhero/I'm in an action game crap besides obligatory dogfight scene, but dat ship was too cool not to have that.
Tom Cruise was believable, and his character's actions weren't distracting given he was a well-trained and highly capable Astronaut prior to being cloned en-masse and used as a soldier. The love story was fine, and the hate sounds like it comes from 'forever alone' brain rather than objective analysis of film events.
Having the clone that finally found his wife able to jog his memories and return him to his 'real' self he was otherwise searching for was touching. An effective love story, especially given Andrea Riseboroughs great performance. The scene after she's killed, and then Tom Cruise goes to the other Tom's platform and asks her to go with him was especially powerfu in the way they built it upl. Loved it.
The Independence Day ending was, of course, pretty knock-off, but on the back of the rest of the film, I really didn't give a shit by that point.
Spoiler
Like I said previously, big budget films are gonna have cliches, no avoiding it. For me my opinion is formed by how they're used. You could say the same thing about the 'turn the ship sideways and escape through the crack while the bad guys crash into it' scene that's been in an infinity billion movies, but does anyone really care? That's just hollywood.
