Starring Tom Cruise and Morgan Freeman. Rated PG. Now playing.

Oblivion is Grade A sci-fi cheese—a largely entertaining mix of Philip K. Dick mind-bends, Space Odyssey futurescapes, and Road Warrior bleakness. Lose yourself in Tron: Legacy director Joseph Kosinski’s ultraglossy glass-and-metal world, try not to think too hard about the twisty tale, and you’ll enjoy this high-design dystopian puzzle.

In 2077, the Earth has become uninhabitable after a violent war with an alien race known as the Scavs, and most humans have run off to a moon off Saturn. Perched in a glass module that looks lifted from some far-off-in-the-future edition of Dwell magazine, Jack (Tom Cruise) and Vika (Andrea Riseborough) are left behind, tasked with monitoring massive, drone-led hydroelectric projects and fighting off remaining Scavs. Jack, his memory erased “for security reasons”, spends his days flying his insectile white ship beneath the nuclear storm clouds, over the bleak ruins of a city covered in radioactive dust: the Empire State Building buried up to its observation deck, the Washington Monument bent in the desert like a broken toothpick.

But around the time Jack finds another living human body on Earth, he realizes something isn’t right with the picture. We’ve had that feeling all along, mostly due to the creepily pert perfection of his submissive Vika, who sits in high heels and Mad Men dresses in her sky loft, too-calmly directing his daily sojourns from a high-tech cockpit.

Cruise is in action mode here, a square-jawed cypher in white leather; only Riseborough, and Morgan Freeman, when he shows up, bring any nuance to the story. But sci-fi isn’t so much about the acting, is it? It’s about being immersed in a believable world—this one set starkly under a half-exploded moon, with video-game combat through steep ravines and underground hideouts.

And rather than finding this taut tale derivative, genre nuts are going to dig the clever references, from assassin droids that look like a mix between Wall-E and RoboCop to a red-glowing HAL eye. Jack might have had his memory wiped, but Kosinski remembers well all that has come before him.