This is one of the good ones. Very good, in fact.

When I saw it in the theater I was kind of flustered because much of the dialogue was unintelligible. I don't know what happened here, but many of the actors delivered their lines so softly or mumbly that I couldn't make out what they were saying. My dad and sister had the same problem.

My initial reaction to this film was that it's sort of like a 2-hour episode of "The Twilight Zone" or "The Outer Limits". We're introduced to an unusual scenario, and we later discover that what we thought was going on isn't what's really going on, and most of the time there's a twist at the end. "The Twilight Zone" was adept at pulling this off with a mere 30-minute running time (less when we account for commercials). The stories were elegantly concise yet compelling. "Outer Limits" did the same kind of storytelling, but with a running time of a whole hour, with much of that time wasted unnecessarily drawing the whole thing out. I used to watch both of those shows on the Sci-Fi channel back when it was the Sci-Fi channel, and I preferred "Twilight Zone" over "Outer Limits" because it doesn't waste my time in getting to the punchline.

So my initial reaction to the first 30 minutes of "Oblivion" was that it's a waste of time on the "life as usual" part of the story. This is the kind of thing that "Twilight Zone" episodes would establish during the first 5 minutes, and then something interesting would happen to move the story forward. This film takes a bit too long in getting to that point. To its credit, it's not as bad as "Battleship" ("When are the aliens finally going to land?!").

As usual, I reserved final judgment until I could see it at home with subtitles to help with the dialogue. While my opinion of the first 30 minutes hasn't changed much, the movie overall was a very pleasant viewing experience. Great story. The "what we think is going on isn't what's really going on" part is way too obvious. Maybe it was just me being old and used to the whole twist thing. But even with knowledge of the twist it's still a fun movie to watch, joining the main character on his journey of discovery.

This is one of the good ones. A solid sci-fi flick.