Skip to main content
Close

After Earth: Non-Threatening Flash of Light

By Brock Wilbur · June 4, 2013

After Earth has a lot working against it. There's the intentional hiding of M Night Shyamalan's directorial involvement, the nepotism of a forth Will Smith/Jaden Smith pairing, attempting to put a post-apocalyptic turn on Gary Paulsen's "Hatchet," well-publicized on-set disagreements, a story by Smith, and sequences reminiscent of Avatar from a director who already made a movie called Avatar. Does After Earth overcome these problems? Not by a long shot.

One thousand years in the future, humanity has recolonized on a new planet, albeit one already inhabited by monster creatures. The Ursas can sense the pheromone of human fear and use it to hunt and murder their prey. Some humans can become completely fearless (a process called "ghosting") which makes them invisible, and therefore valuable military weapons. The leader of humanity is the best ghost in history, the terribly named Cypher Raige (Will Smith), and his son Kitai Rage (Jaden Smith) hopes to fill those shoes, to offer contrition for his cowardice in allowing his sisters to die. 

Father and son join a military training trip to another planet that goes wrong, and a wormhole drops their crashing ship over the abandoned planet of Earth. Cypher and Kitai survive the crash, as does an imprisoned Ursa which is now hunting them across a ruined planet where every living thing has evolved to kill humans.

The film has every chance to become a full-fledged, five alarm Shyamalan disaster, but never does. Despite the derivative aspects and some odd choices, it is completely functional and more-or-less entertaining film, but its utter lack of a message or emotional resonance condemns it to being instantly forgettable. Early in, I thought this might be the natural culmination of Shyamalan's longstanding fascination with humanity's ecological impact, but by the time a group of trees begin to move in a menacing way, recalling The Happening, I realized he just likes that kind of shot. It is a bad film, but only in the way where it has nothing to add and nothing you haven't seen before, better.

Adding to the film's competent mediocrity is the choice to have Will Smith play the most restrained character of his career, which isn't exactly why summer blockbuster audiences turn out to see Will Smith. The hindrance of having a character who, by the nature of his super-power, must always remain stoic, is that you get a gin-dry reading of each line. Coupled with the fact that Will Smith is stuck in a chair for the majority of the film, it means he cannot be relied upon to deliver anything resembling entertainment. Jaden's performance was actually one of my favorite parts of the film, in that he plays a flawed hero with no real strength or courage who seems incapable of accomplishing their mission, making even small victories carry weight. Unfortunately, this is simply the wrong kind of film for that character, as no one wants to watch a son character yell at his real-life father about pressuring him into a career he didn't want, when you're watching the meta $130 million outcome of that disagreement.

The visual effects are superb and the film contains only one laugh-out-loud WTF moment, and that's probably the best summary I can offer. If you want to experience something in a theater, look elsewhere. If you want a non-threatening flash of light to waste two hours, After Earth is perfect, because you won't remember having wasted it.