1.5/5
For the literary-minded, there is also a whole thing about how Kitai is reading Moby-Dick, just like his father did. But there's no great white whale here: After Earth is a great white elephant. Call me Ishmael, when it's over.
5.6/10
A crash landing leaves Kitai Raige and his father Cypher stranded on Earth, 1,000 years after events forced humanity's escape. With Cypher injured, Kitai must embark on a perilous journey to signal for help.
The story kicks in slowly, beat by predictable beat, after a debris storm downs Kitai and Cypher’s spaceship and they fall to Earth in a smashup that looks like someone decorated the set with wet toilet paper and plastic wrap. There, they trade bitter words, clench their jaws and hold back the tears amid long pauses and inert action scenes, most involving Kitai racing through the dense woods and confronting digitally rendered animals. For the most part it is an uninteresting slog alleviated only by the occasional unintended laugh and moments of visual beauty. Mr. Shyamalan generally torpedoes his movies with overweening self-seriousness. But here and there he also offers up an image — as with a close-up of Kitai’s face dusted with glistening snowflakes — that rises out of the torpor.Those images are few and far between in a movie that loses its way long before Kitai reaches the belching volcano that leads to his inevitable destiny. Mr. Smith and his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, are producers on “After Earth,” which suggests that there was no one on the production who could really say no to him. An often affable screen presence, he spends much of the movie in a chair on the spaceship pursing his lips and watering his eyes. It’s a calamitously one-note, unpersuasive performance that’s a match to that of Jaden, a pretty teenager with jumpy eyebrows whose character remains an insufferable brat. Once upon a time, Hollywood parents gave their children sports cars as gifts. These days, apparently nothing less than a big-screen vanity project will do for Junior.
1 Star
It's too bad, the listless “After Earth” needs the elder Smith driving the film, not taking the backseat over enunciating motivational lines like, "Recognize your power: This will be your creation."
Jaden isn't a strong enough actor to hold the center of a massive CGI movie. He's charismatic like his dad but here he appears to have only a handful of facial expressions and rotates between anger, surprise, fear and some serious eyebrow acting for most of the film's scant 90 minute (including credits) running time.
Shyamalan, whose forte is not helming big summer tentpole movies, doesn't bring much to the screen visually. The look of the movie is generic sci fi, and for every cool scene-Kitai soaring through the air in a wing suit, chased by a giant eagle-there are obvious soundstage scenes and cheesy costumes. Then there are the accents-apparently all future people sound like Rolf Harris. And don't even get me started on the logic leaps-how do flora and fauna survive on a planet that falls into a deep freeze every night, for instance.
On the plus side it does have a pretty great last line, and at least it isn't in 3D. But at the end of the day "After Earth's" main crime is placing Will on the sidelines, robbing it of a star that might have been able to make this journey interesting.
The worst of it is that there are a few entertaining moments shining through, but nothing to really connect you to the film on anything more than a cursory level. After Earth is just too obvious and over the top in delivering its message. You know how the film has to progress, and the only thing that may keep you guessing is Shyamalan’s resume.
The only way this type of film would work is if you were invested in the characters, but the lazy character development doesn’t ever allow for that. Both Smiths will certainly rebound from this, and After Earth will likely be forgotten soon enough. For Shymalan though, it marks yet another in a string of failures. It probably won’t end his career, but it certainly won’t help his future prospects either.
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