Review by Patrick Avenell
Before he was born, Jaden Smith appeared in utero when Jada Pinkett Smith popped up in the music video for Just The Two Of Us. That song was Will Smith’s ode to his children, born and unborn, and it is so terribly literal and earnest that it has never survived the skip button.
Fifteen years later, 14-year-old Jaden, dressed in a Daft Punk-style one-piece is travelling through space with his still-serious Dad when an intergalactic storm forces their barely futuristic spaceship to crash land on Earth.
Kitai (Jaden) and Cipher (Will) have descended from human stock that abandoned Earth some millennia ago to lay plantations on Nova Prime, a distant desert, though not deserted, planet. Push back on Nova Prime is from Alien-style aliens called Ursas. These multi-limbed, many-jawed creatures are blind, using their heightened sense of pheromones to detect fear in humans.
Frightening they are, and so successful has been their rearguard that the ex-Earthlings' army includes an elite troop of rangers that have perfected ‘ghosting’, the art of supressing fear in order to fight an Ursa.
Of course, when Kitai and Cipher crash on Earth, an Ursa is on board and escapes, meaning Kitai must face his fears while travelling across the verdant landscape, avoiding highly evolved predators, to save his injured father.
Although Jaden Smith does an amiable job carrying this film through every scene, he receives no help from a wooden Will stunted by some fantastically earnest dialogue that is at parts awkward and laughable, like when David Brent danced at that party in The Office.
Sony reports that this is the first film to be made in Ultra HD (what it calls ‘4K’) from lens to cinema. Whilst not a story-telling science fiction achievement on par with Blade Runner or (the original) Total Recall, After Earth has stunning landscapes captured with expert cinematography sluiced by seamless CGI.
Waterfall diving, valley running and spelunking are all captured with enough intensity to create thrills and the divining of how apex predators will have evolved to elite killing machines is satisfyingly sharp-toothed.
Director M. Night Shyamalan is very good at coming up with concepts but, besides his debut masterpiece The Sixth Sense, has shown an inability to transfer this into drama with anything greater than the barest verisimilitude.
There is none of the futuristic grounding so loved by Dick or Atwood or Ridley Scott: the details that make you believe what you are watching is a plausible vision of the future.
Orwell wrote in 1984 that if one keeps all the small rules, they can break all the big ones. Shyamalan is great at breaking all the big rules, like Earth having four seasons every day, but incapable of explaining why in the future people don’t just airtight wear body suits so the Ursas can’t smell them.
Shyamalan’s films have a habit of explaining the unscientific with a casual ‘that’s just the way it is in the future/outerspace/supernatural’ rather than with original thought or biting social commentary, which ultimately comes across as lazy storytelling.
Throughout the film runs the arching theme of parents being unable to protect their children. While at times this platitude drifts into cliché – the film contrives to actually show an empty nest at one point – it is saved somewhat by a heart-warming moment of pathos and redemption.
The bildungsroman aspect of this film shows a frightened novice having to learn the skills to survive when confronted with an environment that has evolved to stalk him.
For many, however, one touching moment and some genuine thrills will not be enough to offset what is often a silly film. Overseas critics have been particularly scathing, unnecessarily so, as After Earth is an enjoyable if significantly flawed adventure.
The main fault of this film is Will Smith’s boring performance. For an actor that has danced like Muhammad Ali, charmed as the Fresh Prince and gotten jiggy wit’ it, he brings so little life to Cipher that it is like he understood an absence of fear to be an absence of personality. It is a strange thing that he could be mis-cast as his son’s father.
Seeing After Earth did not make me more or less likely to join the Church of Scientology.
Patrick Avenell saw After Earth as a guest of Sony Australia.