100 Minutes
Rated PG-13
Oh how the mighty have fallen. M. Night Shyamalan, a director once touted as "the next Spielberg," now has such a negative reputation that his name was hidden on all the promotional material for his latest strike-out, After Earth. It's unclear if either Sony Pictures or M. Night himself was the reason for not letting the public know this was 'from the director of The Sixth Sense,' but really this felt more like Will Smith's latest attempt at making his child into a movie star than the standard twist-filled Shyamalan fare. The plot pretty much just focuses on two characters: Cypher Raige (Will Smith), a legendary fearless warrior called a 'ghost,' who returns home to his family to father his son Kitai, who is following in his dad's footsteps, training to be a Ranger. During a voyage together, Cypher and Kitai's ship crashes on Earth, now a Class-1 quarantined planet, evacuated 1000 years ago. The only people alive are Will Smith and his son, and Will's legs are broken. It's up to Jaden to travel across the dangerous forests of Earth to retrieve a signaling device for help, or else they both will DIE. Sounds like a plateau for a solid survival/sci-fi father/son story, but pretty much every aspect of the film, from the writing to the pacing to the acting, was completely incompetent.
I don't even know where to start. There were so many stupid moments and things that didn't make sense that I could nitpick for hours. How did Kitai know to take off his mask when he crashed to Earth for the first time? How did he get up and running so quickly after becoming paralyzed? Why does his suit change color? Why did everything on Earth evolve to kill humans if they left 1000 years ago? And I don't think this falls in line with the Charles Darwin school of evolution. It would be easy to blame M. Night for all these problems, especially with his recent track record, but I think the ultimate responsibility falls on Will Smith. He was the one who brought the idea for Shyamalan specifically to direct, he co-wrote the script, he was the one who specially trained his son for the role, and he wanted to turn After Earth into a comic book/video game/movies/novels franchise. To me this really felt like a disgusting attempt by Smith to promote and possibly make up for lost time with his son (using this film as an excuse for his personal "family time").
It's nearly impossible to come up with good things about the film. Most of the CGI was bad, but some of it worked for me (the big alien called Ursa that Kitai faces off against in the finale I thought looked good, if generic), and I liked some of the cinematography. But the whole movie felt rushed, cheap, and as if little care was put into it. The "sci-fi" elements were just so half baked and looked terrible. Everything from the inside of the ship to the costumes to the gadgets looked like a bad Halloween knockoff of what the actual props should be. The whole film felt like it was produced by a bunch of high school juniors; the names of the main characters alone are dumb. Cypher and Kitai. Ugh. And not to mention the acting. Jaden Smith is absolutely terrible in this movie. Maybe with a better actor in the lead it could've been serviceable, but he and Will Smith have no chemistry at all. And this is Will Smith's worst role of his career. He excels when he's in a street-smart comedic role (MiB, Bad Boys), but he just can't pull off this stoic general character AT ALL. Making things worse they're not even together the whole movie, with Will talking to Kitai from their ship via a backpack communicator, so it feels even more hollow.
I'm happy that this film flopped at third place opening weekend, because it felt like it came from the wrong place from the very beginning. In many ways this movie is an allegory for Jaden Smith's career; "Earth" is Hollywood, and Will Smith, using his warrior-wisdom, guides him from afar to make him into a fellow soldier, or in real life, an actor. But the more you try to read into the film or any of its supposed themes, you're already thinking ahead of the writers (you'd think Academy-Award winning screenwriter Mark Boal, who co-wrote the script with Shyamalan, Gary Whitta, and likely Smith, would have spruced it up a little more). Without any behind-the-scenes knowledge, it's just a really bad sci-fi movie that I couldn't imagine anyone would enjoy; it's boring, repetitive (lines are literally repeated twice in a row), looks bad, sounds bad, acted terribly, and has a boatload of logic gaps. I wouldn't recommend this film to anyone.
Rating: D-
Bonus - Additional Reading
Vulture ran an interview with Will and Jaden Smith last month about the new film and about working together, and I think it gives a good insight as to how bizarre their relationship is. Apparently they both like patterns a lot. You can read the article here.
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