Stranded on a barren, lifeless planet, a million miles away from comfort, a father and son fight for their very survival. One could be talking about After Earth’s Cypher Raige and son Kitai’s ordeal on the savage Earth of the future, but it is just as fitting a comparison for Will and Jaden Smith, who have this desolate film to overcome. Although the story is credited to Will Smith—who has clearly imagined After Earth as a starring vehicle for his son—no one can ignore the doesn’t-know-he’s-dead guy in the room, M. Night Shyamalan.
Whether or not you were aware that the spooky Philadelphian helmed After Earth when walking into the theater, it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to recognize his signature style and mostly lazy storytelling conventions. Writing the script with Gary Whitta (The Book of Eli), Shyamalan wastes no time commencing with his most irritating narrative gimmick; announcing the rules of his tale, so audiences have an easy checklist and needn’t bother with pesky things like development or surprise. Whether it’s elder Smith informing his progeny of the time limits and geographical pitfalls he’s going to face, or Smith the younger blabbing about how the alien can kill him, the film is awash in inane babble designed to bypass organic event and wonder.
In After Earth, all of that sanctimony begins with a belabored narration delivered by Jaden Smith’s Kitai Raige (yes, it sounds like he should be in a 90’s arcade game), telling of mankind’s exodus from Earth and their travels to Nova Prime and their battles with alien invaders. The alien infiltrators sent monsters known as Ursas to kill the humans; generically designed critters that can actually smell human fear and look like the Planter’s Peanut guy had a wild night with that stringy E.T. from Super 8. Then came Will Smi—er, I mean, Cypher Raige, who could mask his fear through a technique called “ghosting” and led the elite caste known as Rangers against the menace. Now, Kitai is trying his best to follow in dad’s footsteps, but the gruff man keeps resisting him—there’s tragic baggage between them both—and so mama Raige suggests a ‘take your son to work’ day so that bonding may commence.
This trip goes south (but not as south as those inexplicable accents) when the spaceship carrying them both crash-lands on a quarantined planet dangerous and deadly to humans. Of course it turns out to be our long lost blue orb, Earth, and with all of the crew dead, the tail end of the ship missing, and Cypher crippled and bleeding out, it’s up to Kitai to prove his merit and race across this forbidding landscape and recover the emergency beacon. There was also an Ursa prisoner onboard and now it may also be out in the wilderness, along with fearsome baboons, giant hawks, and saber-toothed cats, all looking slightly more digitally spiffy than your average SyFy Channel B-movie.
The set-up should yield a terrifically entertaining and emotionally walloping adventure; a young man looking to save his father and earn his respect must test his mettle, while dad, sidelined by injury, must talk him through the danger while wrestling with his own demons and demands. While it’s infinitely better than Airbender, and not nearly as insane as The Happening or Lady in the Water, After Earth is still an egregious waste of resources, and Shyamalan has never seemed as disinterested or resigned as he does here. If the movie itself is mostly mediocre, fans of the genre may find the final product galling for its complete laziness and apathy towards the science fiction setting.
The production values are curiously muted and feel like thrift-shop versions of the real thing. The interiors of Raige’s ship look like an Ikea threw up all over itself, and the ‘living suits’ and cutlasses the Rangers carry are shiny but make little logical sense as gear used to defeat giant, predatory aliens. Some attentive audience members can even be forgiven if they conclude Shyamalan has returned to his twisty ways and stranded the Smith duo on primeval Earth of the past, since the planet displays only one single sign of human imprint: cave paintings. One assumes you’d see a skyscraper, or a rusted car, or maybe a Starbucks, y ’know, something. Instead, this Earth crawling back to Eden feels more like Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth, and Shyamalan piggybacks on that idea to the point we have flights with helpful, over-sized birds, a quest to the top of a foreboding, active volcano, and a skirmish that looks like someone just animated over the Samwise and Shelob battle from Return of the King.
If the imaginative elements fall flat, so too does the direction, which lacks dramatic visual impact and renders the action inert and disconnected. We watch young Kitai run and leap and hide, racing against the clock to conserve his ‘breathing liquid’ and save his dad, and none of it ever achieves gravity or urgency. Logistically, Shyamalan has also handicapped his picture by misusing his talent. Who wants to see a Will Smith action movie where the charismatic star must adopt a scowl and a ludicrous Southern-fried accent, spending the entire story sidelined on the floor, muttering instructions to his kid? Jaden Smith is then left as the sole lead, and he simply doesn’t have the screen presence to carry the film. He’s done no favors by Shyamalan, who films him in a tilted, low-level close-up that often features him crying down into the camera. After about the third tear-fest, I started to sympathize with Cypher, who suspects he’s sired a pansy.
A subplot about a family member lost to the Ursa doesn’t inject the film with pathos in the same way that the lower budget but similarly themed It’s in the Blood did last year. That movie featured Lance Henriksen and Sean Eliot trapped in the wilderness, the father incapacitated and the son struggling with fear and a failing of the past; there was even a spindly spider-beast who suckled on the elixir of human terror. While I’m not suggesting that Shyamalan even saw, let alone copied, Scooter Downey’s modest indie horror, it’s a sad state of affairs that the big-budget movie with the A-list talent doesn’t muster half the conviction. Family audiences will want to embrace After Earth, and its theme of familial bonding in the face of great adversity. Don’t be fooled, though; there’s nothing here you haven’t seen before, done better and with more confident energy. That includes a closing shot of humpback whales so corny that even Captain Kirk would roll his eyes in disdain.
After Earth opens in wide release on Friday, May 31st.