This father-son sci-fi wilderness adventure starring real-life father
and son Will and Jaden Smith is nothing more than an overlong and overly
sadistic obstacle course, both for its main character and the viewer. As the
teenager hero of After Earth makes
his way though dangerous territory, leaping from safe spot to safe spot, the
movie leaps from lazy cliché to lazy cliché and listless life lesson to
listless life lesson beat by predictable beat.
In the film’s exposition-heavy prologue we find out humankind now wears
a lot of white unitards and moved to distant Nova Prime a thousand years ago
because of Earth’s manmade downfall, elucidated through a stock montage of
floods, fires, riots and explosions. The natives of our new home planet,
none the happiest to be colonized however, have engineered super alien beasts known as Ursas—they are not
bearlike, in case you were wondering—that are almost blind, but can track,
hunt, and kill by smelling human pheromones—“they literally smell fear,” the
voiceover helpfully explains. What I’ve just described—and so, so, so much
more—could have easily been expanded into a full-length feature. Director M.
Night Shyamalan squeezes it into about five minutes, and packs everything full
of superficial details, justifications, and rationalizations that are both
unnecessary and unimpressive.
