Title: After Earth
Directed by: M. Night Shyamalan
Distributed by: Columbia Pictures
Release Date: May 31, 2013
Rated: PG-13
Synopsis: A crash landing leaves Kitai Raige and his father Cypher stranded on Earth, a millennium after events forced humanity’s escape. With Cypher injured, Kitai must embark on a perilous journey to signal for help. (Via IMDB)
Shaunta’s Review: I watched three movies during my recent trip to New York for BEA. Mostly because it was so hot and humid that a movie theater was the only entertainment I could manage comfortably. My daughter and I both loved The Great Gatsby, and we were entertained by Now You See Me. But After Earth? Ugh. Not so much.
Where to start? First, I think the biggest problem is that there is this underlying feeling of serious nepotism that runs through the movie. Jaden Smith would never have been cast if Will Smith wasn’t his father. I truly believe that. I don’t think the dad Smith is doing the son Smith any favors by constantly developing these projects for him. Throughout the film, for me, I kept feeling like I was watching some kind of father/son project that just happened to have a gigantic budget. Beyond that, there were some serious problems, though.
The movie is basically about a man who has learned to completely turn off all emotion–which makes him imperceptible to these alien monsters who can only find prey by smelling fear. Smelling fear. I’ll leave it up to you to imagine what it was like to watch two hours of a totally emotionless Will Smith. The character’s son (who is also the actor’s son, of course) is far more empathetic–which his father sees as a complete character flaw. Of course, you only know that because he says so. He has no emotional reaction to anything. At all. You might expect that the character change comes from dad learning to feel something–but you’d be wrong. Instead the son learns to be just like his old man. Two emotionless men. Wouldn’t you just love to be the wife/mom in that family?
I think maybe that the idea of a fear-smelling baddie that causes people to cultivate the ability to completely disengage from their emotions sounded good in theory, but it didn’t translate well into film. When you spend the vast majority of a movie with only two characters, and one of them has no emotional affect at all, it just doesn’t work.
But wait! There are more problems. The giant bird that carries a 15-year-old boy to it’s nest? The Earth reverting to prehistoric times? The Earth being uninhabitable to humans without some magic lung juice–but perfectly fine for the weird prehistoric animals that live there? The Earth getting a hard freeze every night, and then thawing to beautiful green, flowering glory every morning? Has M. Night never had a garden?
I just didn’t enjoy this one. I won’t be surprised if it turns out to be the worst movie I see this year.
