Just when it looked like Tom Cruise's comeback was cemented thanks to "Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol," the biggest hit of his career, the actor hit another dip, with neither "Rock Of Ages" nor "Jack Reacher" setting the world on fire, with the latter looking increasingly unlikely to be the franchise starter that the actor and studio Paramount hoped it would be. But Cruise was ahead of the game, heading into territory he's rarely ventured into before — hardcore science fiction — with a pair of original sci-fi action movies coming up.
Next year brings Doug Liman's "All You Need Is Kill," but first up is "Oblivion," the second film from director Joseph Kosinski, who made his debut with "Tron Legacy," and a second trailer for the film has just arrived at MSN (via HeyUGuys). And it's done a somewhat better job at selling the movie than the first footage did.
Toning down the "Wall-E" vibes from the first spot, the new clip lays out the plot a little more clearly. Years after a terrible war that caused Earth to be evacuated, Cruise plays Jack Harper (again with the Jack?), a drone repairman who lives in orbit with his wife (Andrea Riseborough). But he's haunted by strange memories of a woman (Olga Kurylenko) he's never met, and when he finds the same woman in an escape pod, he soon finds everything he knows is a lie.
The film still feels like a mish-mash of multiple other sci-fi influences, but the new trailer is more effective of selling the impressive visuals, the basic mystery at the heart, the unique, bright look of the film, and the supporting cast, most notably Morgan Freeman as Morpheus a mysterious resistance leader, and Melissa Leo as what appears to be the upbeat-yet-sinister villain of the piece.
The underwhelming "Tron: Legacy" certainly has given us pause in our anticipation for this one, but that film was cripped by its dreadful screenwriting, with script work here from Oscar winners William Monahan ("The Departed") and Michael Arndt ("Little Miss Sunshine"), things are certainly a little more promising, not least with a score from M83 on the way too (is that a glimpse of it in the promo?). Watch the trailer below, along with some new images from the film, and you can catch "Oblivion" in IMAX theaters from April 12th, with wider release following the week after, on April 19th.