The king of summer is back, Will Smith brings his big summer movie credibility to team up with his son Jaden in hopes of launching his movie career to the next level in
After Earth. This movie was very quietly directed and co-written by M. Night Shyamalan, which is unlike his previous movies where his name was above the title. At this point, sadly, the Shyamalan name is more harm than good.
Set 1000 years after the Earth becomes inhabitable, humans now live on a planet named Nova Prime. Little did the humans know when they took over this planet there was an alien species, that fed on people's fear, that were trying to kill the humans. Cypher Raige (Will Smith) figures out the way of defeating the aliens called "ghosting" which is not having any fear and therefore becoming invisible to the alien. Kitai Raige (Jaden Smith) is working hard to enter the Rangers where his father becomes a hero, but while physically capable is not ready mentally. Cypher decides that it's time to become a father, so he embarks on one last mission (it's always the last mission!) this time bringing Kitai along. While transporting one of these alien creatures to take it to another planet for training, they navigate through an unexpected asteroid field, suffer major battle damage to the ship and crash-land on the nearest planet, which just happens to be, wait for it, Earth.
Of course everyone on the spaceship is killed except for Kitai and Cypher, who is badly damaged and can't leave the chair he's sitting in. Cypher sends Kitai on a mission to find the tail end of the ship that broke off while crashing towards Earth, which is 100 kilometers away so he can get supplies and a beacon to signal a rescue team. Of course they had all of this stuff on the front end of the ship but all that stuff was apparently sold in the future version of the dollar store because it's all cheap junk that breaks on impact. This Earth is full of animals that have somehow evolved to absolutely hate humans, even though they haven't seen them over the past 1000 years. From there, Cypher has to guide Kitai through the forest and a ton of very unlikely scenarios to guide him towards the tail end of the ship.
What an absolute piece of garbage. Quite frankly, this is as lazy as movie making gets. There was not one thing that happened in the movie that was not cookie cutter, color by numbers predictable. For a director that has made his career over having interesting twists in his movie, Shyamalan plays everything far too safe here. Because Will Smith is basically hospitalized the entire movie, he never gets to really show the charismatic qualities that make him one of the biggest actors in Hollywood, yet without him this movie would much worse. Jaden Smith delivers probably the worst performance I've seen by the star of a summer movie. Both Will and Jaden speak in some weird accent that sounds like British meets Indian. Jaden is almost incomprehensible at some points, especially the beginning when he's trying to explain the fall of mankind on Earth. Jaden tries to keep up with this terrible accent the entire movie and it never gets any better, while Will for the most part goes in and mostly out of it.
As for the good,
After Earth was visually solid but not spectacular, the CG didn't look bad but wasn't that believable or impressive either. For the most part the pacing of the movie was pretty decent as well, except for some of the flashbacks and exposition scenes that occur while Kitai is off on his adventure. Clocking in somewhere around the 100 minute mark, the movie isn't nearly as long and painful as it could have been. This is also more of a kid's movie than they market it to be and in that way it's kind of Shyamalan's successor to
The Last Airbender. Except for some graphic imagery, I'm almost surprised this didn't get a PG rating.
Rating: 1 out of 5
