AFTER EARTH (M. Night Shyamalan). 100 minutes. See listing. Rating: N
What happens when M. Night Shyamalan decides to make a science-fiction adventure? The same thing that happens when M. Night Shyamalan decides to make anything: a potentially interesting project is slowly suffocated under the weight of its director’s crushing pretensions.
To be fair, the problems with After Earth may well be rooted in its story, initiated by co-star Will Smith as a project for his son and heir apparent, Jaden. It’s a bespoke young adult thriller about an uncertain teenager who must find his inner strength to save himself and his injured father when they survive a crash landing on a hostile planet.
The twist is that the planet is Earth, a thousand years after humanity emigrated to a healthier world – but it’s not really a twist, since the movie does absolutely nothing with the idea. (They could be on Chiron Beta Prime for all it matters.)
Anyway. So after their space cruiser gets bashed around in a gravitonic storm and makes an accidental hyper-jump to old, abandoned Earth, hard-ass Space General Cypher Raige (Will) and his resentful son Kitai (Jaden), who just flunked out of Space Ranger School much to his father’s disappointment, find themselves stranded on Earth in the front section of their ship.
Cypher has two broken legs and can’t leave the wreckage, so he has to send the untested Kitai – equipped with a limited supply of the “breathing fluid” that lets his lungs endure the toxic air of the hostile environment – on a 100-km trek to find the signal beacon that can bring them home. One minor complication: their ship was also transporting an angry alien monster called an Ursa that hunts humans by the pheromones we generate when we experience fear, and it may have been set free in the crash.
Kitai’s journey makes up the entire movie, with some flashbacks peppered in to expand the paper-thin story to 100 minutes. It’s lovingly shot by longtime David Cronenberg collaborator Peter Suschitzky, and the visual effects are for the most part very nicely integrated into the action. But it doesn’t work at all, because every one of M. Night Shyamalan’s ideas is terrible.
Maybe a few of After Earth’s really bad ideas were in the draft Will Smith commissioned from screenwriter Gary Whitta before Shyamalan joined the project. Maybe Smith always intended to play Cypher Raige as “Samuel L. Jackson, but more serious.” Maybe it was Whitta who came up with the notion that our descendants would speak English with a weird accent that suggests the only people who migrated off-world a thousand years earlier were South Africans with slight facial paralysis.
It’s doubtful, though. Both of those mistakes are in line with Shyamalan’s other idio-tic notions of cinematic gravitas, to say nothing of his own self-regard. I’m also positive he came up with his characters’ ridiculously contorted vocabulary, where “travel” is the verb of choice for going to light-speed because “warp” and “jump” are too closely associated with Star Trek and Star Wars.
And let’s not get into the notion of the Ursa, which we’re told in exhaus-tive voice-over was designed by a never-seen alien race to hunt humans by pheromones alone – pheromones we instantly stop secreting, and of which our clothes and bodies retain no trace whatsoever, the moment we conquer our fear.
That said, there are two awful things in After Earth that cannot be pinned solely on Shyamalan. The first is a monologue by General Raige in which he tells the story of how he discovered he could control his fear response. It’s laboured and overly expository, like pretty much else Shya-malan has written, but its themes and concepts are rooted in Scientology. The words could have been scripted by L. Ron Hubbard himself – or by Lancaster Dodd, the Hubbard manqué played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in The Master.
The other awful thing is Jaden Smith. If The Karate Kid made him look like a viable actor, After Earth takes his nascent career and shoots it repeatedly in the face. The poor kid is in over his head, incapable of playing the emotional changes the role requires, at sea when it comes to maintaining that weird accent and hopeless at carrying an entire film on his own. He makes Jennifer Lawrence in The Hunger Games look like, well, an Oscar-winner.
Anyhow, that’s After Earth. It’s not as terrible as The Happening and not as boring as The Last Airbender, but it’s pretty bad. Thanks, M. Night. You can stop now.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @wilnervision
