Saturday, June 15, 2013
After Earth (M)
The Earth of the future is a concept thrown around cinema countlessly, and will continue to be for decades more, changed and debated in the form of entertainment again and again. Though now, creators have started to take that concept into their own hands in a more environmentally mindful world, attempting to spark debate about issues like sustainability and technology.
What purpose the attempts carry though is arguably not that relevant to a generic cinema audience. If it was, they’d stick to films like An Inconvenient Truth.
M Night Shyamalan and Will Smith have come together to give us a father-son story set on an uninhabitable Earth, where Senior Commander Cypher (Smith) and Kitai’s (Jaden Smith) ship has crashed, everyone else has died and the only way they can get assistance is to send a signal from a device in the wreckage of the tail of the ship 100 kilometres away.
Cypher is injured, so it’s up to Kitai, a cadet soldier who didn’t pass his recent test, to face the beasts now roaming Earth. The Smiths love good family time, but this is bonding of a different kind. Cypher is cold, having removed all fear from his life and trying to teach his son the tricks of his trade. Kitai, though is a bit of a wimp.
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| Courtesy The Hollywood Reporter |
For a Shyamalan film so far set from his previous films, it all comes across as a bit of a self-help lesson, patronising to both the kid and us watching. Facing fear in adversity has been explored many times before, not least by Shyamalan, but it’s been done much better in films of the sci-fi genre as well as others.
The overall story (Will Smith’s concept) runs pretty thin, and the screenplay (by Shyamalan and Gary Whitta) maintains enough of a flow but feels it has to compensate for the lack of story by making Kitai encounter everything possible on his way to the finish line. For Shyamalan, heavy on his themes of the unknown, it’s a poor effort with nothing to remotely surprise the viewer.
To the contrary of other reviews, the film is not a complete disaster. Camera movements carried off by cinematographer Peter Suschitzky are varied to remain fresh, while the overall look of the uninhabited land remains intriguing.
The Smiths, however, don’t look the best off this. Will is restricted to serious mode as a generally unlikeable character. He is robot. Jaden plays the wimpy Kitai really wimpy and garners no sympathy from anyone. Emotional involvement is limited - but that’s how future humans are going to be right? Cold and calculated...
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