After Earth
Cast: Will Smith, Jaden Smith, Isabelle Fuhrman, Sophie Okonedo
Direction: M. Night Shyamalan
Rating: 3/5
Our man in Hollywood returns with a new film that stars Will Smith and boasts of a $130 million budget, so we are excited.
This time, M. Night Shyamalan – the man who was supposed to reinvent Hollywood cinema – is on his most ambitious trip yet. After Earth teems with sci-fi excess, at the same time reiterating Shyamalan’s slant at serving pop philosophy.
For Smith there was the dual job of establishing teenage son Jaden as hot box-office property, besides living up to his own super stardom. Just as it was important for M. Night to pull off a huge hit with this one, labouring as he has been under the burden of recent duds.
The pressure becomes obvious. As the film plods through its 100 minutes, you realise these guys don’t quite seem sure of what exactly they were out to peddle. As sci-fi, After Earth looks too generic in its content and visuals to stand out. As a slice of wisdom on fear and belief, the film is really irrelevant.
A thousand years after Earth is destroyed, humans live on the planet Nova Prime. Kitai (Jaden) is a budding ranger who joins his dad Cypher (Will Smith), a veteran in the job, on a voyage.
The ship crashlands on post-apocalypse Earth and Cypher is critically injured. Kitai must journey the hostile planet to locate and retrieve the ship’s tail and a beacon that they need to signal for help back home.
After Earth tries mixing Kitai’s adventure amid giant baboons, toxic leeches and other such dangerous flora and fauna with a story of father-son bonding. The chemistry the Smiths share has its moments and remains the best bit.
But the film itself is of the sort that aimlessly tries cashing in on sci-fi as a saleable genre (remember Peter Jackson’s King Kong?) and routinely slips. After Earth is neither a spectacular mainstream adventure nor the genre-bender experiment you would expect from Shyamalan.
May be, M. Night should forget boys who fight baboons and go back to boys who see dead people.
