After Earth (2013)
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
One thousand years after cataclysmic events forced humanity's escape from Earth, Nova Prime has become mankind's new home. Legendary General Cypher Raige returns from an extended tour of duty to his estranged family, ready to be a father to his 13-year-old son, Kitai. When an asteroid storm damages Cypher and Kitai's craft, they crash-land on a now unfamiliar and dangerous Earth. As his father lies dying in the cockpit, Kitai must trek across the hostile terrain to recover their rescue beacon. His whole life, Kitai has wanted nothing more than to be a soldier like his father. Today, he gets his chance.
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One can only assume that he hit upon this idea after the Smith clan's book club reading of Dune, so much does After Earth borrow from Frank Herbert's seminal sci-fi classic.
While Jaden Smith’s 15-year-old acting does warm up after the train wreck of when the camera first features him, “After Earth” is a performance regression for someone who has proven quality dramatic acting with 2006’s “The Pursuit of Happyness” and 2010’s “The Karate Kid”.
The actor's real-life son Jaden (" The Karate Kid ," "The Pursuit of Happyness") plays Cypher's son Kitai, an aspiring warrior who just failed his cadet promotion test.
He is trying so hard that the teenager's engaging on-screen presence, the one that made "The Karate Kid" such a kick, mostly disappears.
In the film, Smith and 14-year-old son Jaden, who was quite good in “The Karate Kid” reboot, play futuristic father and son Cypher and Kitai Raige, the former is a general and famed warrior among his soldiers the Rangers, the latter just failed his Ranger test, and daddy is not happy.
For whatever reason, he proves unsuited to the role (in contrast to The Karate Kid ) but it's unclear how much of his overwrought, clumsy performance is a result of limited innate ability and how much derives from a bad screenplay wanting to highlight Kitai's immaturity and the coldness of his relationship with his father.
Jaden, who made a strong screen debut opposite his pop in “The Pursuit of Happyness” and starred in the successful remake of “The Karate Kid” has grown not only as a young man but as an actor.
The journey can be nail-biting and at times exhilarating (I'll once again reference Life of Pi).
In the last half-hour, after Kitai slips the bounds of his father’s tech-assisted overparenting, the movie gives full voice to its animating philosophy, which resides somewhere at the convergence point of Life of Pi , Dianetics, and Stuart Smalley’s daily affirmations .
While it’s not quite awful, it also pales in comparison to recent achievements like Life of Pi.
But it’s Shyamalan’s career, and that of producer-director Will Smith , that seem to be struggling for survival in this listless sci-fi wilderness adventure — a grim hodgepodge of “Avatar,” “The Hunger Games” and “Life of Pi” that won’t come anywhere near equaling those juggernauts with the ticketbuying public.
When Winona Ryder backed out of The Godfather: Part III due to exhaustion, Francis Coppola cast his daughter Sofia in the pivotal role, and her wretched performance kept that movie off-balance for its entire running time.
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MARK: I have no idea who this Will Smith fella is, but his kid the star of the new summer blockbuster “After Earth”…yes, I’m aware the film looks like a father/son team surviving a futuristic world together, but this is more like a sci-fi version of “The Bone Collector”.