After Earth Review

I remember a time when the release of a new M. Night Shyamalan film was something to look forward to.  The same goes for anything starring Will Smith.  Well, my friends, those days have long since passed and we're left with naught but ashes and dust and a crappy summer sci-fi movie called "After Earth" (no relation to the far superior flick "Another Earth").

"How bad could it be?" I thought.  The reviews for this movie have been terrible but surely there must be something worthwhile to latch onto, right?  And that's where the problems lie.  There's much in this movie that I found to be quite good.  It's just that every single time I started to like "After Earth" something else would happen to make me dislike it again.  It's an incredibly frustrating experience.  I would rather a movie be a 100% terrible waste of time.  That way I could just wholly dismiss it and move on to the next cinematic experience without a trace of guilt on my shifty conscience.  Not so with "After Earth".  It annoys me to no end.

I get the feeling that this movie was spawned from the loins of greed, nepotism and Scientology.  Obviously, all movies come from greed and are intended to make money, but the involvement of Smith (who also produced and came up with the film's story) point towards the latter two.  Casting his son Jaden opposite himself is yet another clear attempt at forced starmaking - the movie is filled with signature scenes intended to showcase Jaden's range of acting talents.  That wouldn't be a problem if he displayed even the slightest hint of the charisma he had in "The Karate Kid" remake (a movie I loved), but he only inspires cringing here.  It just feels like the rich dad who's letting his son run his company at the expense of the employees.

Then there's the Scientology angle.  I must admit that I don't know much about this wacky "religion", just what I've seen on "South Park".  I get the feeling, however, that Scientology infuses much of the story of "After Earth" (the Smiths are die hard Scientologists).  Or maybe it's just because of the scene with the giant erupting volcano - it reminds me of the old television commercial for "Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard".  I detect a faint whiff of "recruitment tool" and it annoys me.

Then, after setting down a shaky foundation, the producers hired M. Night Shyamalan to direct.  Bad idea.  He hasn't exactly been at his "A-game" recently.  After starting out with the little-seen Rosie O'Donnell drama "Wide Awake" (a decent flick) he hit it big with "The Sixth Sense", a classic creepfest which ignited a wave of ghost movies that continues to this day.  Then came the ahead-of-its-time superhero redux "Unbreakable" (Shyamalan's best, in my opinion) followed by the great alien-laden thriller "Signs", featuring extra-terrestrials who get hurt by water.  Lots of people thought it was stupid of the aliens to come to water-heavy Earth to capture humans for food.  I just figured that their population was starving and we were the only option around, and left it at that.  If only they had replicators.

Things started to go wrong with "The Village", a decent movie, but it seemed like Shyamalan was buying into his own hype and was self-conciously copying his own filmmaking style rather than just "making the movie".  "Lady in the Water" was the moment when he truly flew off the rails.  Based on a bedtime story he used to tell to his kids, "Lady" was a silly, awkward disaster.  "The Happening", his first R-rated horror flick, is easily the worst movie he's made to date.  After that came "The Last Airbender", a big-budget fantasy adventure which pissed off fans of the original series ("Avatar: The Last Airbender") and bored everyone else to tears.  That same year he produced and thought up the story for the horror movie "Devil", which actually turned out to be decent.

Which brings us to "After Earth".  Let the awkwardness continue.  Like I mentioned before, every time I would begin to get intrigued by an interesting idea or piece of tech, or would admire a great CGI shot or creepy sequence, the movie would knock me back down with bad acting or awkward staging or an intrusive flashback or plain ol' disinterested filmmaking. This is Shyamalan's first movie shooting on digital video, and he makes the same missteps many directors do on their first time out.  Sometimes DV looks incredibly good, other time it looks incredibly artificial, like the guy who buys an HDTV and turns the sharpness all the way up because he thinks it looks better when, in fact, it makes everything look like fake crap.  And the musical score, usually a highlight of Shyamalan movies (even the bad ones), is completely forgettable here.

Even Will Smith is a non-prescence in this movie.  While I enjoyed his restrained, low-key, emotion-blocked performance at first, after awhile I just wanted to see him crack, to show any kind of emotion that would help further the relationship subplot of a father trying to reconnect with his son.  Nope.  The movie refuses to hit all but the most cursory story beats.  In the end, it felt unearned to me and we get multiple shots of Smith just trying to keep his eyes open.  Engaging stuff (sarcasm).  In fact, the father/son plot line is just a ruse - the movie ends up being a rite of passage movie where the untested young warrior must pass through the Dianetics volcano and defeat a multi-legged boss monster in order to become the badass warrior he was always meant to be, thereby earning daddy's respect, and is rewarded with an emotionless hug.  Is this Scientology?  I don't know.  It stinks, no matter what.

There could have been a good father/son sci-fi bonding movie here, if developed properly.  I'm not sold on the whole "in 1000 years, all life on Earth will evolve to kill humans".  Um, why would nature evolve to kill us when there hasn't been any humans on the planet for ten centuries?  Explain, please.  See, this movie is pissing me off the more I think about it.  "Star Trek: Into Darkness" was dumb, but it has heart and some well done action sequences.  Ditto for "Fast & Furious 6".  What does "After Earth" have?  It has a tagline which reads "Fear is a Choice".

No, fear is an actual physiological reaction.  Dumbasses.

I'm outta here.