After Earth

After Earth, the latest film by M. Night Shyamalan is a disappointing and unfulfilling way to spend an hour and forty minutes of your life. After Earth is neither entertaining or charming and those are the two traits ANY movie needs to have to be successful at the box office. I don't know if the producers just thought having Will Smith in the movie meant they didn't have to make a better film, that people would see it regardless as to whether the film was good. If that was their thought process, they missed the mark big time. Because of that I give After Earth one and a half buckets of Killer Korn.





This may finally be the deathknell for director and one time wunderkind M. Night Shyamalan. The man who brought us the amazing The Sixth Sense was believed to be the next Spielberg at one point. What an insult to Steven. After Sixth Sense, every movie afterwards was progressively worse and he lost me as a fan with his truly sorry 2002 Signs starring Mel Gibson ("Swing away Merill"). His career was on its deathbed after his atrocious 2010 release The Last Airbender, but for some reason Will and his team came knocking on his door an offered him a chance to breathe life back into his directing life and I have no idea why. Were they hoping he could recapture the magic that was Sixth Sense? Did they think all those other movies that he directed that were horrible were just him going through a slump? They will have to answer those questions once people see this waste of time, unless I can dissuade you not to go and wait for bootleg video. Seriously, it's not even worth being bought from the store.

After Earth stars Will Smith as Gen. Cypher Raige and his son Jaiden Smith who plays Kitai Raige, Cypher's son. Cypher is the kind of military father, hardly home, always off world training new Rangers and leaving his family to fend for themselves. He's a very "by the book" kind of man and of course his son is more intuitive and instinctual so there's the first conflict of personalities, the two have nothing in common. Kitai wants very much to be a Ranger but isn't "by the book" enough and doesn't get promoted. The glue that holds these two polar opposite characters together, and the only warmth in this cold, dead fish of a movie is provided by the lovely Sophie Okenedo who plays Faia Raige, Cypher's wife and Kitai's mother. She is sorely needed in this movie and sadly her screen time is maybe 8 minutes long. Cypher is returning home only to ship out again to deliver an Ursa to a cadet training facility. An Ursa is a big, ugly, and blind beast that was unleashed on man after we relocated off of earth to Nova Prime. While the Ursa cannot see man, they can smell our fear and they track us off that pheromone we excrete when we are scared. The only way to beat the Ursa is to not be afraid, hence the training Ursa.

Ship gets hit by an "asteroid storm" (WTF?), yawn. Ship go down in pieces, yawn. Only two survivors confirmed, yawn. And the distress beacon is in the other part of the ship that might as well be on the other side of the planet, and only Kitai can retrieve it since dad is, of course, mortally wounded, YAWN! Honestly, this movie is told in the trailer. Watch the trailer enough times and you have the movie. There are some serious story telling issues and plot holes in this movie that you could drive a truck through. The only emotional content is when, in typical M. Night style, he recounts in painstakingly slow steps the death of Kitai's sister Senshi Raige played by Zoe Kravitz. She dies at the hands of an Ursa, and her death is the reason father and son have this disconnect. Father is mad at son for not protecting his sister and son is mad at father for being off world and not being there to keep them safe. Let's not ask how the damn creature made it into their hi-rise apartment all those stories up from the surface, let's just ignore that fact.

I honestly think M. Night, who wrote this screenplay by the way, needs to go back to film school. His techniques are tired and his passion seems to have vanished. He relies far too heavily on CG and his story telling is just off. There is really something missing in After Earth, something BIG and I am still trying to figure out what that is and I may never know...sigh. Could it be that there are NO surprises in this film? Anyway, the score is flaccid and I am really losing patience for James Newton Howard. Much like M. Night was supposed to be the next Spielberg, James was supposed to be the next John Williams, what an insult to John. His music is too soft, for the lack of a better word and it always strikes me as this score could have been the music he did for the last film he did. Nothing sounds project specific from him. The sets look like rejects from John Carter and the cinematography is only impressive when CG is involved. Look, skip After Earth like you should have skipped Fast & Furious and find something else to spend an hour and forty minutes of your life on, you won't regret it, I assure you and I'll see you at the theater.