When your two lead characters are called Cypher Raige and Kitai Raige, you just know you’re in for a excrement storm. Father and son, Will and Jaden Smith team up again (they were great together in The Pursuit of Happyness) for After Earth.
A story that follows a father and son who find themselves attempting to survive after crash landing on planet Earth, many eons into the future. It’s a different planet now. Humans are long gone, and basically a few monkeys, a big eagle and a few slugs are hanging around. Granted, they’ve evolved to kill anything human so poor old Cypher and Kitai find themselves in all sorts of bother. So much bother, than the one time Fresh Prince of Bel Air finds himself with two broken legs and their only hope of being rescued is for Fresh Prince junior to travel a 100km and set off an emergency beacon. Not a great deal wrong with the plot, stereo typical sci fi by the numbers, but alas, everybody fucked this up.
The story itself, once you get passed the initial idea is so full of shite, that this reviewer actually started noting down the many disasters. The story pushed the fact that Earths inhabitants are now lean, mean, human spine eating machines. That may well be so, but a bunch of super evolved monkeys are still afraid of getting their paws wet, in an early chase sequence with Jaden Smith. But the monkeys are the least of the problems. For a father and son team, who genuinely seem to have a blast on chat shows when on the PR trail, they have about as much chemistry on screen as a shotgun blast to the face. And while we’re on the topic of father and son, the accents, especially Will Smiths’ is nothing short of horrific. He attempts a poorly executed, authoritative tone throughout, which instantly starts grating your nerves and gets more and more annoying as the movie trundles on. A bag of kittens going through a mincer wouldn’t sound as painful. But it doesn’t stop there.
The realism portrayed on Smith’s part is simply non existent. After a major crash, he barley has a scratch, his two legs are busted and he’s not even moaning or groaning in the slightest bit of agony. Hell, he’s not even sweating. Granted, he is Will Smith, but seriously. And for a portion of the movie he just lies down, stretched out, knocking back pain killers, when he obviously doesn’t even look like he’s in pain. So, we’ve made it this far, surely theres something good. While I’m thinking about that, lets talk a look at the editing.
To me, it looks like M. Night Shyamalan shot absolute tonnes of poor footage, ran out of time and takes while an editor attempted to splice a load of crap together. This is particularly apparent in the first half, where fluidity is bundled up and thrown away.And the reason I can say this, is I’ve been behind the camera a number of times on personal projects and have ended up with shit footage and attempted to fix it on the edit suite. It can’t be done.
The performances of Jaden and Will Smith leave a lot to be desired. Jaden is a fine young actor and theres no denying that his old man is one of the biggest movie stars on the planet. But with dodgy accents, appalling dialogue, father and son seemed to have left their talents behind somewhere. As for it’s director, M. Night Shyamalan, who was arguably on of the finer directors around for a while, what the hell was he doing during the production? Asleep? Locked in a toilet?
So, is there something good? Visually, After Earth is ok. It’s nothing spectacular, we’ve seen it all before and while the CG just about cuts it. But, it doesn’t really matter. Ridiculous accents, dialogue, editing, performances and everything else makes this one of the worst movies of the year
It’s more After Birth, than After Earth.
A story that follows a father and son who find themselves attempting to survive after crash landing on planet Earth, many eons into the future. It’s a different planet now. Humans are long gone, and basically a few monkeys, a big eagle and a few slugs are hanging around. Granted, they’ve evolved to kill anything human so poor old Cypher and Kitai find themselves in all sorts of bother. So much bother, than the one time Fresh Prince of Bel Air finds himself with two broken legs and their only hope of being rescued is for Fresh Prince junior to travel a 100km and set off an emergency beacon. Not a great deal wrong with the plot, stereo typical sci fi by the numbers, but alas, everybody fucked this up.
The story itself, once you get passed the initial idea is so full of shite, that this reviewer actually started noting down the many disasters. The story pushed the fact that Earths inhabitants are now lean, mean, human spine eating machines. That may well be so, but a bunch of super evolved monkeys are still afraid of getting their paws wet, in an early chase sequence with Jaden Smith. But the monkeys are the least of the problems. For a father and son team, who genuinely seem to have a blast on chat shows when on the PR trail, they have about as much chemistry on screen as a shotgun blast to the face. And while we’re on the topic of father and son, the accents, especially Will Smiths’ is nothing short of horrific. He attempts a poorly executed, authoritative tone throughout, which instantly starts grating your nerves and gets more and more annoying as the movie trundles on. A bag of kittens going through a mincer wouldn’t sound as painful. But it doesn’t stop there.
The realism portrayed on Smith’s part is simply non existent. After a major crash, he barley has a scratch, his two legs are busted and he’s not even moaning or groaning in the slightest bit of agony. Hell, he’s not even sweating. Granted, he is Will Smith, but seriously. And for a portion of the movie he just lies down, stretched out, knocking back pain killers, when he obviously doesn’t even look like he’s in pain. So, we’ve made it this far, surely theres something good. While I’m thinking about that, lets talk a look at the editing.
To me, it looks like M. Night Shyamalan shot absolute tonnes of poor footage, ran out of time and takes while an editor attempted to splice a load of crap together. This is particularly apparent in the first half, where fluidity is bundled up and thrown away.And the reason I can say this, is I’ve been behind the camera a number of times on personal projects and have ended up with shit footage and attempted to fix it on the edit suite. It can’t be done.
The performances of Jaden and Will Smith leave a lot to be desired. Jaden is a fine young actor and theres no denying that his old man is one of the biggest movie stars on the planet. But with dodgy accents, appalling dialogue, father and son seemed to have left their talents behind somewhere. As for it’s director, M. Night Shyamalan, who was arguably on of the finer directors around for a while, what the hell was he doing during the production? Asleep? Locked in a toilet?
So, is there something good? Visually, After Earth is ok. It’s nothing spectacular, we’ve seen it all before and while the CG just about cuts it. But, it doesn’t really matter. Ridiculous accents, dialogue, editing, performances and everything else makes this one of the worst movies of the year
It’s more After Birth, than After Earth.
