Runtime: 1 hour, 39 minutes
Rating: PG-13
Director: M. Night Shymalan
Quick Impressions:
An average fourteen-year-old boy walks around on Earth for a few days—not the most enticing premise. But how about this? Quentin Tarantino writes a leading role especially for Will Smith—in a movie that becomes an Oscar-winning box office hit—and then Smith refuses to take the role because he prefers to make a film with M. Night Shyamalan. Now there’s an intriguing scenario! (At worst, a surprise hit for Shyamalan, at best comedy gold!)
For reasons that I think are obvious, I’ve been dying to see this movie ever since Will Smith passed on the lead in Django Unchained. (Now to be clear, the original reason given—that the part wasn’t a good fit for his usual screen image—actually made sense to me. When you’ve managed to become a multi-millionaire just by being universally pleasant, why would you want to play a character like Django? And now I hear that Smith also thought that Christoph Waltz’s character is actually the lead in Django Unchained (which is true, so apparently Will Smith has a better eye for that kind of thing than most Academy members). So I don’t think Will Smith passing on Django Unchained was necessarily a bad decision. But now why did he want to make a movie with M. Night Shyamalan again?
Wisely, not one of the two-thousand-one theatrical trailers I saw for After Earth even mentioned the name M. Night Shyamalan, perhaps hoping to keep the fact that he’s the director a secret from audiences. They kept it up so long that I half expected Shyamalan’s name not to appear until the closing credits as After Earth’s twist ending. I am not kidding. Not one single theatrical trailer for the film mentioned that Shyamalan is the director. But somehow, movie goers found out, anyway.
I get why people dislike M. Night Shyamalan. It’s because his movies are always terrible. So expecting an M. Night Shyamalan movie to be a train wreck and making a point to avoid it seems pretty reasonable.
But why does everybody seem to hate Jaden Smith? The way people carry on about despising him, you’d think he was a Nazi war criminal! I really, really do not understand why there’s so much hate for Jaden Smith. Why wouldn’t a father who is successful in any industry try to facilitate his son’s future success in that industry (if that’s what the son wants to do)? If I were a millionaire and my daughter wanted help breaking into the industry that made me a millionaire, I wouldn’t tell her, “Too bad. You have to work at McDonald’s. It’s character building. The only way you’ll ever be as rich and successful as I am is if you steal my will and murder me in my sleep!”
But now, all of these issues aside, is After Earth a good movie?
No, not really. But the truly disappointing thing is, it’s not a laughably bad movie, either. It’s mainly just sort of mediocre. As is usually the case with M. Night Shyamalan films, it has an intriguing visual sensibility and some beautifully framed shots.
I also liked the score, which is not a surprise since outside of Betty Buckley’s performance, the score was the only redeeming quality of The Happening. Shyamalan’s movies usually feature scores that appeal to me for whatever reason.
Will Smith gives a solid performance as Cypher Raige. And as Kitai, Jaden shows a propensity for action and the ability to cry realistically. But the movie is pretty boring. The idea of Cypher Raige as the first person to discover “ghosting” is maybe the most interesting part. Clearly the movie should have been about that character—the interesting one—as he did interesting things. But it’s not.
The Good:
Will Smith, Sophie Okonedo, Jaden Smith, and Zoë Kravitz all give pretty solid performances. To be honest, I think Sophie Okonedo is the best since until she shows up all of the characters seem weird like they’re trying hard not to be normal but for no apparent reason. For sure, they’re affecting a peculiar cadence—the accent of the future, I guess, but they do it inconsistently, and it ends up being distracting. Sophie Okonedo isn’t given great lines or a lot of screen time, but she manages to seem like a real person with relatable concerns nonetheless. And Zoë Kravitz isn’t half bad, either. She’s probably the only one in the entire movie who delivers her lines by just talking. I think Okonedo gives a better performance, but Kravitz at least does not come across as a needlessly affected weirdo like basically everyone but the Raige family in the movie.
Jaden Smith already showed in The Karate Kid that he’s willing and able to rise to physical challenges. His work in the action scenes is commendable. He’s very fit and agile, and you get the idea that he’s doing many of his own stunts (within reason). He’s also good at showing emotion on screen (and has been since The Pursuit of Happyness). He seems to convey emotion naturally, and he’s at his best when there’s a traumatic crisis (though he ends up looking kind of silly in the venom scene, but that’s really not his fault).
Will Smith, of course, is a good actor. He gives himself a relatively limited role here, but he plays it really well. Django was a much better role, in my opinion (and I think Smith would have been better in it than Foxx who was not bad), but Cypher Raige, too, is outside of Smith’s usual cinematic range. The character is exceptionally restrained and quiet. Smith plays the part well, but I find the character a little frustrating. Well, it’s actually the premise of the movie that frustrates me. Let’s create this really fascinating and remarkable guy—and then let’s show him at a moment when he’s able to do almost nothing. I don’t think this film is doing for Jaden what his father hopes it will. I mean when you make a movie about how the father casts such a long shadow that the son is barely able to take a couple of gasping breaths outside of it, it’s kind of hard to forget that Jaden is the son of a famous father and that at the moment, Jaden only wants to be an A-list star. He clearly has not arrived.
Visually, the movie is also quite arresting. Unfortunately the visual style of the early scenes reminded me of The Fifth Element. (That’s unfortunate because The Fifth Element has more of a sense of humor about itself, and I’m thinking I might have preferred to be watching that.) Particularly when Cypher and Kitai are on the ship as its still operating normally, every time the camera focuses on someone, the person’s head seems unnaturally large. It’s almost a fish-eye effect, and I could not stop thinking of The Fifth Element every time I saw a shot like that.
The scenes on Earth are quite breath-taking, though. I think M. Night Shyamalan is a very gifted director visually. If you turn down the volume and ignore the story, he’s never made a bad movie. His films feature the most exciting scene framing this side of Citizen Kane. He’s just not always very good at telling a coherent, properly paced, interesting story. After Earth is refreshingly coherent, but story wise, it’s still kind of plodding and dull. But it sure makes Earth look exciting. It could be a tourism video for our planet. Watching, I kept thinking to myself, I wish I could go hiking in a National Park right now. (Also, the trees kept making me want some Reese’s Pieces.)
The movie has a strange earnestness that keeps it from going completely off the rails. In some ways, if it were a worse movie, a sloppier movie, it might be far more enjoyable to watch. But instead it just keeps chugging along like the Little Engine that Could, determined to keep chugging away to the end, but thoroughly unremarkable. (But that’s a horrible analogy, huh? The Little Engine that Could is a sentient, talking, blue train that always has a smiley face, so that’s pretty far from unremarkable, although that picture book does feature gorgeous visuals and repetitive, monotonous text.) Anyway, the point is, I think I would have preferred a train wreck.
On the other hand, my four-year-old daughter (who decided she wanted to see the movie because she’s fascinated by outer space and was excited by the idea of a real life father and son on a space adventure) watched almost the entire film very attentively. (The big fight scene at the very end scared her, so she shut her eyes and promptly fell asleep, missing the last five to ten minutes of the movie.) Personally, I thought the film had little genuine urgency, but my daughter had a very different opinion. From the moment they reached Earth, she was scrunched against her security blanket, eyes wide, terribly concerned about each new danger that Kitai faced, and always asking lots of pertinent questions. (Some of them that related to the environment were pretty good questions, too, so I’m wondering if maybe the filmmakers would have benefited by consulting with some four-year-old children about science.)
My point is, my daughter got thoroughly engrossed in the movie (and was very upset when she awoke at the end of the credits to discover that she had missed the ending). So maybe if they edit this movie for television and excise the most terrifying material, Another Earth will find a very welcoming home on Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network or other family friendly basic cable. Certainly it will do well on Netflix.
Best Scene:
This will probably sound dumb, but I like the part where Kitai is running as fast as he can through the forest, and I like it because this scene made a number of people in the audience laugh. I think there should have been more scenes like this, when the characters seem really human and relatable. I also liked the moment when Kitai first learns that he’s accompanying his father on his journey. For one thing, that moment actually feels exciting. It’s very easy to empathize with Kitai, and Jaden Smith does a great job of conveying his excitement and how much such a trip means to him. It’s really a shame that the rest of the movie does not deliver the kind of adventure promised by Kitai’s anticipation. I love all his incessant smiling in the first scene on the ship, too. He feels like a real kid when he overdoes it like that.
Another fantastic scene is Will Smith’s monologue about fear. Now, we’ve already heard most of this in the trailer (and we’ve heard something very like it in Dune. All through this movie, I kept thinking, Fear is the mind-killer and wishing I were watching that Dune mini-series.) Still, it’s a nice moment to showcase the elder Smith’s acting talent, and it’s also clearly what you’re supposed to take away from the movie. It isn’t subtle at all (and I’m also not completely sure that it’s true. I remember hearing on an episode of Oprah when I was eight that we women should always trust our fear instincts, and to me this seems like sound advice. Yes, “fear is a choice.” But I think under some circumstances, fear is the rational choice. I will admit, however, that Cypher Raige’s take on these matters sounds a lot more bad ass).
Best Scene Visually:
All the scenes on Earth look great. The part where Kitai does his impression of a flying squirrel is pretty spectacular to watch, but I equally enjoyed watching him clamber up the rocks or just wander through the trees (though I kept daydreaming about E.T., I’ll admit).
The volcano at the end is also really cool, although if you’re an actor who is committed to denying that you’re a Scientologist, perhaps you shouldn’t make the visual centerpiece of your movie a gigantic volcano that looks exactly like the cover of Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard as shown on all those incessant, low-budget 1980s TV commercials. This is particularly true if while standing near the volcano, a character is trying to rid himself of past traumas and react in the moment, using his rational mind to gain mastery over his baser impulses.
It is an impressive looking volcano, though.
Funniest Scene:
The final words spoken in the movie are by far the funniest.
Everybody laughed. (The scene bugged me a bit, though, because the joke somehow made me feel that I should have just watched a much more powerful movie. I just mean something like the first Die Hard or even Independence Day. The power of the ending joke just reminds you that the rest of the movie doesn’t live up to its potential.)
Best Action Sequence:
My daughter definitely liked the scene with the baby birds and the wildcats best (although I am one-hundred percent sure that she was rooting for the cats because she thinks she’s a lion cub).
The fight scene at the end feels inevitable but is still serviceably exciting as it happens.
The Negatives:
The biggest problem here is that (like the now hostile atmosphere on Earth, apparently) the movie is just a little thin. I think another problem is that Will Smith seems to want to make his son a bankable action star at fourteen. That doesn’t seem like a very realistic goal to me. Who are the other fourteen-year-old action stars? In The Hunger Games, Josh Hutcherson plays a teen, but in real life, Hutcherson turns twenty-one this year. He’s now a young man, and he’s spent the past decade appearing in like four movies a year. Seriously, if there’s a boy in a movie in the 2000s, it’s probably Josh Hutcherson. And he’s not the one opening the movies. He’s just appearing in them (usually not as the star). There are plenty of child actors in action movies marketed toward children, but this film is rated PG-13 and clearly aimed at a wide, mostly adult audience. In every trailer, the name used to sell this movie was Will Smith, and he’s made a career out of being someone that everybody likes. Everybody. People of all ages. People of all races. How in the world is a fourteen-year-old kid who has only appeared in a handful of theatrical releases (and it’s like ET’s hand, not like a human hand with five fingers) supposed to carry a big budget, sci-fi action film aimed at general audiences? Why not give him a youth-oriented franchise, or make him a super-hero, or get him a sitcom, or get him juicy supporting roles that give him the chance to show audiences that he’s got talent and charisma? Jaden Smith actually does have talent and charisma (though seemingly less than his father). But this is the wrong vehicle for making him a star.
There are other problems, too, of course. A big one is that the story is so simple and barebones, and yet it still doesn’t make a lot of sense. The whole premise seems weird to me. For one thing, the “uninhabitable” Earth seems a lot more habitable than the planet they’re currently squatting on. Why would you want to live some place that looks like Tatooine, especially when mysterious aliens are dumping (poorly) genetically engineered human-killing monsters on you? (That’s the premise, right? I feel like I missed something, but this was what my husband took away, too. Those Ursas aren’t the other alien race? They’re creatures made by another alien race? I feel like more time should have been spent explaining that set up, and that the explanation would have made a more interesting movie in its own right.)
If your society is so advanced that you can fly from some habitable world in the far reaches of space and then accidentally get all the way back to Earth, then why couldn’t you just build some domes on Earth or something? If the monkeys and wildcats and the little tapir things can live there, why can’t the people also make it work? (That leads to some other minor quibbles. If there are only certain few hotspots, then when Kitai reaches one of them, shouldn’t he find just tons of animals hanging out there already?) I’m also not sure why every organism on the planet evolved to kill humans when all the humans
were gone. That seems like strange evolution to me. (But of course, Will Smith’s character is a soldier, not a biologist, so maybe we should not let his extremely serious delivery fool us into believing that he knows what he’s talking about.) My husband has similar complaints about plot elements, and his are all different than mine. So let’s just say there’s a lot to complain about there.
Definitely some plot elements are too deus ex machina for my liking. At one point, I was like, “So who’s doing that? Is it Zeus? Is it Gandalf?” For a while there, I was really hoping it was Gandalf. In my mind, a pretty great imaginary scene played where Kitai woke up, wiped the frost off his face, and found himself staring up at Ian McKellan in a white robe. Picture it. Kitai rubs his eyes blearily. Gandalf intones wisely, “After Earth comes Middle Earth!” Of course, that didn’t actually happen, but it almost did. Seriously. What really happened was just as unlikely (though not as trippy, I’ll admit). I thought that part was so incredibly cheesy, though my daughter really, really liked it, so if you’re four, too, maybe you’ll like it.
At the end of the day, the movie really isn’t terrible. It’s just not very good. Will Smith gives a good performance, and (though for some reason people seemed determined to hate him) so does Jaden. But that’s really not enough. For a post 2004 M. Night Shyamalan movie, After Earth is surprisingly coherent. But that’s not enough either. There’s no real sense of urgency. Maybe Cypher might not make it home (wink wink ’cause I mean, right, Will Smith isn’t going to make it to the end of the Will Smith movie???), but Kitai definitely will get home. We never doubt that. Ever. (Well, my daughter did, but she is four.) With a better premise, a better script, and either more characters or better lines for the existing characters, this movie would be much better. The director and the stars and all reasonably talented, but you wouldn’t necessarily come away with that conclusion if this movie were the only evidence available.
Overall:
I have always liked Will Smith, and my husband loves him, so we collectively wish good things for him and usually enjoy his work. (In fact, just last week driving home from a day trip, we listened to like all of his late 80s raps with DJ Jazzy Jeff because we were feeling nostalgic). I like Jaden Smith, too. He’s not yet as good an actor as his father, but he definitely does have talent (though he’s lacking his dad’s seemingly natural charisma. Jaden is great in the really dramatic moments, but he doesn’t give the audience enough reason to stay invested in watching him in the ordinary ones).
Believe it or not, I even like M. Night Shyamalan. For some reason, I seem to end up going to most of his movies. They’re not good anymore, and I know beforehand that they won’t be, so I really can’t explain why I keep buying tickets. (Maybe years from now, the twist ending to my life will reveal the shocking reason for my seemingly indefensible behavior.) Even though Shyamalan’s had a lot of failure, he’s still had way more success as a writer than I ever had, so there’s no point in me insulting him. Plus I think the name he made up for himself sounds cool.
After Earth is not a very good movie, though. It’s not horrible. It’s just that for a film with so much non-stop action, it’s not very exciting. The stakes seem really low because you just have this feeling the whole time that the only two characters you really know anything about are going to turn out being just fine in the end. And then again, if they’re not, you really don’t care.
I will say that we saw this movie in a packed house, and at the end, several people applauded (and then other people laughed at them). Then one man stood up, spun around, smiled vaguely at no one in particular, declared in a loud voice, “That was pretty good!
He’s sure come a long way since The Bell Prince of Fresh Air!” Then he smiled again, whirled around in a complete circle, and walked out of the theater alone. So if anybody tries to tell you that no one thinks this movie is any good, don’t you believe it—because that guy thought it was “pretty good.” I heard him say so myself.