Here we have the trailer for Last Vegas, directed by Jon Turteltaub (National Treasure, Sorcerer’s Apprentice) and written by Adam Brooks (Bridget Jones Diary, Practical Magic) and Dan Fogelman (Crazy Stupid Love, Fred Claus), a creative dream team united by their love of collecting easy paychecks. Like all horrible paycheck movies, everything you need to know about it is in the title. Four old guys – Robert Deniro, Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman, and Kevin Kline – are getting back together for one wild weekend in Vegas for Michael Douglas’s bachelor party, and to the actors’ credit, none of them seem to mind that Al Pacino and Christopher Walken already made this movie like three months ago. Like an uncredited sequel to Michael Haneke’s Amour, it’s an unflinching look at the ravages of Father Time, who’ll gradually take away everything you have, starting with the ability to recognize when a script is patronizing you.

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I’ll forgive a lot for an IMAX film shot in 4K resolution with a ridiculously dramatic M83 score featuring panoramic vistas of Iceland that I can watch without shitty 3D glasses, but the surprise of Oblivion is that there wasn’t that much to forgive (though the score is pretty overbearing at times). Other than Tom Cruise’s creepy hairless torso, and the fact that every woman in the future seems to be a supermodel who wants to fling herself at Tom Cruise’s creepy, hairless, 20-years-older torso, it’s actually an artful mish-mash of older sci-fi that borrows from just enough sources that it doesn’t feel like a ripoff. It succeeds on the strength of cinematography, character design, and careful withholding of information. It leaves you feeling confused until the very end, much like my lovemaking, and when it finally lays its cards on the table, it feels like it actually had something to say. Or at least, something to say other than “thanks for the 15 dollars, sucker!”

Tom Cruise plays Jack Harper, because “Jack” is to action film heroes what “Madison” is to yuppies, but even the genericness of his name is partially explained later by a clever script. Cruise is part of a “mop-up crew,” a two-person team consisting of Cruise and a hot redhead played by Andrea Riseborough, who live a sick sky-flat with a heated pool and modernist platform bed high above a post-apocalyptic Earth, whose job it is to do maintenance work on series of droids that protect giant, seawater-fed reactors that power the new human colony on Titan, a moon of Saturn. The droids protect the reactors from “Scavs,” the remnants of an alien race that lost a war to the humans, though the Earth was rendered mostly uninhabitable in the process. (*deep breath*) OR SO TOM CRUISE AND THIS REDHEAD BROAD HAVE BEEN TOLD.

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The handcuffs were Tom’s idea.

Prior to yesterday, the only thing I knew about Oblivion was that Tom Cruise allegedly tried to get Olga Kurylenko to sign a contract to become his latest girlfriend while they were filming. And that would have made me sad, because she seems like a delightful young lady who happens to be very fun to look at. But that never happened, and now I know everything there is to know about Oblivion, because a third trailer was released yesterday and now I don’t have to see the movie.

Starring Cruise, Kurylenko and Morgan Freeman, Oblivion is the story of a post-war Earth that has been ravaged by an alien war, and Cruise is playing mop-up duty on the surface as he takes orders from a spaceship full of people. And they keep promising him that they’re going to bring him home to outer space, but he just needs to kill a few aliens first. OR DOES HE???

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It’s been almost three years since Inception came out, but you’d never know it by this week’s trailers, which are still helping Hollywood’s BRAAAAHM sound operators earn record profits. Didn’t Eisenhower try warn us about the burgeoning BRAAAAHM-sound industrial complex? I fear this has grown beyond our control.

Oblivion, from Tron Legacy director Joseph Kosinski, looks like the kind of sci-fi movie designed for people who thought Looper wasn’t “space-y” or “future-y” enough (not that there’s anything wrong with that). It stars Tom Cruise as a droid maintenance man from a future human colony in space, who spends his days cleaning up the now-uninhabitable surface of the Earth. That is, until ONE DAY (*record scratch) he finds out, surprise surprise, there are still some people down there, and their thetan levels are off the charts. So Cruise orders up some personality tests, hooks everyone to e-meters, and gets them all to help make a recruitment video starring Will Smith’s kids. The video converts the whole galaxy and they all live happily ever after in a psychiatrist-free utopia ruled by Emperor Danny Masterson.

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“Mustang, this is Big Top, bringing out the full package,” coincidentally, is also what I say into a walkie-talkie right before I get arrested for indecent exposure.

As you can see, the trailer has just hit for Antoine Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen, starring Gerard Butler as a Secret Service agent stuck in the White House after terrorists take over and Speaker of the House Morgan Freeman has to become acting president. If you ask me, Morgan Freeman becoming president seems like a win-win for everyone, but according to screenwriters Creighton Rothenburger (HOLY LACROSSE NAME, BATMAN!) and Katherine Benedkt, this is considered “conflict.” Moreover, this seems to have everything you’d expect in an action movie:

It’s Die Hard in a _____!

Explosions.

CUT TO: “…Oh. My. God.”

But what it isn’t is White House Down, the original Die Hard-in-the-White-House movie starring our boy Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx (yes, this is a real movie, with Independence Day‘s Roland Emmerich directing). Does Olympus Has Fallen have C-Tates as agent Cole Baretta? Does it have Chet Haze as Cole Baretta’s protege, agent-in-training JJ Streetz? Does it have Cole Baretta’s partner, a talking pit bull voiced by Pit Bull? Does it have zombie attacks, or the ghosts of Tupac and Biggie showing up to give Cole Baretta advice like Obi-wan Kenobi? No, it has none of these things. Granted, unless Sony gives Burnsy that re-write job he’s been pushing for, neither will White House Down. But White House Down gave us the room to dream, and that’s what’s important. So Antoine Fuquoff with this non-C-Tates-having garbage.