After Earth

Released: 2013
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Starring: Will Smith, Jaden Smith

Self-indulgent and boring

There are many crimes a film can commit and get away with them. It can have a dreadful script but performances that outshine the words; it can have appalling acting but fabulous action and effects that confound the audience; it can be thoroughly ridiculous but still quite good fun. The one crime that can’t be excused is for a film to be boring. When you have a film with bad acting, a rotten script, no sense of humour and is boring it’s a fatal combination. And that’s what we have with M. Night Shyamalan’s latest film After Earth.

Based on a story by Will Smith, this is the story of legendary general Cypher Raige (Smith) and his son Kitai (Smith’s own son Jaden) who are stranded on Earth after their spaceship crashes. Earth has been uninhabitable for humans for a millennium and Kitai has only limited time to travel 100 kilometres to set off a rescue beacon to save himself and his father. Kitai’s journey is made more perilous by an escaped alien who tracks humans through their fear pheromones and the fact that Earth’s wildlife has evolved to kill humans.

There’s so much wrong with After Earth that it’s hard to know where to begin. So let’s start with Will and Jaden Smith. I love Will Smith, I think he’s one of the most charismatic film stars in Hollywood but he’s strangely dull here. Not one ounce of fun or charisma or personality seeps through into his performance. Cypher is a focused soldier who has perfected the art of “ghosting” – showing no fear, but I’m sure he could have done so with a bit of character. Jaden Smith isn’t any better – he spends the film with a face like a sulky brat who has been forced to have “fun time” with their embarrassing dad. Hmmm. I’ve never seen Jaden Smith act before and I’ve missed nothing. To call his performance wooden would be kind. Sophie Okonedo has a very small role as Cypher’s wife and Kitai’s mother and she actually puts in a relatively good performance.

The script was mediocre at best and it was clearly a directorial decision to have the poor lines in a ridiculously stilted manner. God knows what Shyamalan was thinking when he made his actors sound like a bad am-dram group on their first read-through. The characters were all fairly unlikeable and when a group of baboons chased Kitai into a river I was hopeful that there was a crocodile lying in wait to catch him and end the film early.

There is the basis of a decent story here – a battle against the elements with some father-son bonding but nothing is done to make that story work. There’s some ok effects but also some rubbish CGI animals. Nothing works and the film is turgid. At 90 minutes it feels so much longer and my mind started to wonder, particularly about why you would call a creature an “Ursa” and not make it a bear, or bear-like at all. I also wondered why fear was such a bad thing – surely fear, as one of our basic emotions, is one of the things that make us human?

Some have commented that the film is little more than a nod to Scientology’s teachings but happily I know nothing about Scientology so didn’t make any connections, and actually if someone wants to make a film that pays tribute to their religion that’s fine. I just wish they made a decent film rather than self-indulgent, boring clap-trap like this.