After Earth

2013 sci-fi movie

Rating: 12/20

Plot: Humanity has been forced off the titular planet after we failed to listen to Al Gore. While in their new home, an alien race invades and uses blind predators called Ursas which smell the fear of their victims and then kill them and impale them on tree branches. Thankfully, one human dumbly-named Cypher Raige has perfected the art of "ghosting," a way of eliminating all fear in order to hide from the Ursas. He becomes a big deal after teaching the other rangers to do that. Meanwhile, his son, even though he has similar physical gifts to his father's, is an emotional wreck because of a violent episode in his past and can't become an official ranger. Son Kitai tags along with Dad as the latter travels to train a group of rangers, but along the way, they run into some asteroids and have to escape via wormhole. They end up crashing, predictably, on a quarantined Earth where only crew members with the surname Raige survive. Dad's badly injured, and Kitai has to make a long and dangerous journey to find the back half of the ship to send a distress signal home.

This is nowhere near as bad as I expected it to be, and its main problems aren't even really M. Night Shammalammadingdong's fault this time. This is the first movie he's directed that wasn't "written by" M. although he did write the screenplay. No, this is all from an idea that Will Smith had one day for how to get his son a lot of screen time. The whole thing reeked of Scientology from the get-go, but I'm not sure there are really any connections between those beliefs and the plot of this thing. Of course, I don't know much about Scientology. Instead, it has more to do with Moby Dick, and you could probably, if you wanted to invest that much time, figure out that this is a sci-fi retelling of the Melville classic. It's too bad my wife didn't watch this with me. She could have helped me with some of the Dick parallels since she pretended to read the book once. That at least makes it somewhat interesting. And I liked a lot of the visuals and would argue that this has better special effects that are at least as good as that Hobbit movie. The asteroid sequence looks cool and so does the ship's destruction. Violent shots of dead baboons and a bunch of guys impaled on tree limbs are also pretty cool, and a lot of the landscapes--both on Earth and wherever they end up--look great. Of course, not all of the special effects look good. When the baboons are alive, they're almost comical, and whenever the Ursas pick up a character, it looks unbelievably stupid. This movie also suffers from its lack of ability to overcome its implausibilities. Back to those baboons for a moment. How can Will Smith's kid outrun hundreds of crazed CGI-baboons, especially when he's not used to Earth's gravity which apparently makes him heavier? Actually, that scene seems perfectly logical when you compare it to the one where he becomes a flying squirrel and tries to out-fly an angry CGI-bird. The Smiths are both flat enough to take a lot of the wind out of this thing, something I was willing to blame Shammalammadingdong for until I read that the elder Smith really directed his son in this and coached him on how he should act. It seems like Scientology has finished vacuuming out all of the Fresh Prince's personality. He's ultra-stoic, like the bravest cardboard you'll ever see. I actually thought he was worse than Jaden here. The kid's developing the physical features needed to be an action hero although his voice is hard to listen to. He's got a weird unidentifiable accent in this for some reason. They're both pretty wooden, and since they're the only characters in the majority of this, it makes the whole thing a bit of a chore for parts of it. The writing certainly doesn't help them, so maybe it is M. Night's fault after all. I mean, "My suit turned black. I like it, but I think it's bad," is not great writing. I'm not sure there's a child actor alive who could have pulled that one off after his Halloween costume started changing colors. The music is also really awful, awful in disruptive ways. Luckily, the visuals, including some great shots that show off Shammalammadingdong's visual eye and a pretty good story with some emotional father/son depth that makes it easier to connect with than a lot of science fiction keep this from being a complete disaster. In fact, it's Shammalammadingdong's best film in many, many years.