Smith senior produced the movie with his wife and Jaden’s mother, Jada Pinket Smith, and it’s based on a story written by Smith, for his son, after a family television-watching session.
And yet, despite Smith enjoying absolute creative control of the project from the very beginning, what’s especially curious about After Earth is how badly miscast it is.
In particular, it’s hard to imagine that Will Smith could have found a less appropriate actor than himself for the main role: an emotionally stilted, dramatically drained, utterly humourless caricature of a veteran military officer: a cross between Patton and Spock, but with less human charm than either.
Smith Senior plays the preposterously named Cypher Raige, a stick-up-the-backside military man and father to 14-year old Kitai Raige, played by Smith Junior.
A thousand years after mankind has fled earth for colonies among the stars, General Cypher is a key figure in the defence of humanity against the monstrous alien Ursa, who can sense human fear: Cypher has learned to “suppress his fear”, which makes him effectively invisible to the aliens.
Kitai is on a “take your son to work” day with his father when their spaceship get smashed by asteroids and they crash land on a nearby planet, one supposedly “unfit for human habitation”, where “every life form has evolved to kill humans.” Guess where? It’s our very own planet earth, now abandoned to the trees.
Cypher’s legs have been broken in the crash, and his son is the only able-body available to trek for 100 kilometres across dangerous territory to retrieve a homing beacon that will save both their lives.
The only other survivor of the crash is... an alien Ursa, which for some reason was being transported in the cargo compartment, and is now at large in the forest.
From this point, father and son take on quite different roles – Kitai adventures across the surface of Mother Earth, weathering outrageous fortune as he nears the site of the lost beacon, while dad sits at a computer console in the crashed spaceship, monitoring his son’s progress and issuing orders.
This amounts to Will Smith’s worst performance ever – sat on his tush, delivering portentous platitudes direct to camera (“Recognise your power. This will be your creation”) while trying to convey his inner turmoil by sounding constipated and making chewing movements with his jaw.
Smith Junior, unfortunately, is a boy sent to do a man’s job; in spite of his pedigree, he’s not (yet?) up to the task of carrying an entire action movie on his shoulders. Clearly the poor lad has been directed to telegraph his fear as much as possible, which he does by chewing his lip, furrowing his brow, and jerking his head about, while his dad hounds him over the phone to man up.
At least After Earth is something of a milestone for director and co-writer M. Night Shyamalan – it may one day be seen as the movie that arrested his steep decline, in that it’s no worse than the last two movies he made: The Happening and The Last Airbender.
The one-time wunderkind auteur worked as a director-for-hire on this Smith, Inc project, and so may be able to sidestep some of the blame for its flop. Yet the evidence of his dead directorial hand is everywhere, especially in his use of tediously long close-shot scenes where almost nothing happens – apparently designed to fool the audience into thinking that there is some process of dramatic suspense going on.
In science fiction terms, the movie is a disaster. Cypher and son just happen to be flying through interstellar space in the neighbourhood of man’s interdicted home world when they get hit by flying space rocks in a totally phony “mass expansion” event that clever General Cypher detects by pressing his wedding ring against the ship's hull. Hey, who needs instruments?
As the movie progresses, the reasoning behind almost every plot point rings false: why carry a dangerous prisoner Ursa on a ship with passengers? Why not keep a few more emergency beacons about the place? Why do the human military use only high-tech (but useless) swords to fight the dumb brute aliens, and not guns? And why is all Kitai's essential kit made from thin rubbishy plastic that keeps breaking at critical moments?
The cumulative effect of all this is that’s its impossible to take the film seriously – and certainly not as seriously as it takes itself. “Root yourself in this present moment now,” Cypher orders Kitai; “Danger is real, but fear is a choice.”
Sheesh, Dad – lighten up.
One star (out of five)
Director:
M. Night Shyamalan
Stars:
Will Smith
Jaden Smith
Runs:
100 minutes