Will Smith is makes a good leading man. Jaden Smith? Not so much.
After a series of duds, each worse than the last, director M. Night Shyamalan (The Last Airbender) has been given the keys to a Will Smith (Men in Black 3) vehicle co-starring his son Jaden Smith (The Karate Kid).
In After Earth, the Smiths play a father and son duo (Cypher and Kitai, respectively) who crash land on a futuristic Earth that has been abandoned by humanity and reclaimed by nature. After sustaining a serious injury, Cypher tells Kitai to retrieve an emergency beacon from the other part of the spaceship, which landed a considerable distance away.
What follows is a heady mish-mash of influences, ranging from the highbrow (Tarkovsky, Melville) to the lowbrow (Lost, The Day After Tomorrow) to the baffling (Dianetics, as made famous by Scientology). It all sounds a lot better than it actually is.
The writers (Shyamalan and The Book of Eli’s Gary Whitta) mix and mash without much grace or finesse. The film opens with a stunning crash sequence, then backtracks to a tedious exposition dump/flashback before circling back to that stunning crash sequence.
The movie strains under the weight of its “visionary” ambitions. Shyamalan and Whitta are guilty of trying way too hard to push an incoherent, scientifically nightmarish mythos down the audience’s throat while doing a surprisingly decent job riffing on a generic coming-of-age story.
None of the individual story elements — not the well-respected but disconnected father, the son with an inferiority complex or the hackneyed tragic family backstory — are original in their own right. However, when smashed together like this, After Earth occasionally lurches to life.
The film offers intermittent laughs and even a few touching moments scattered throughout the fairly trim 100 minutes. Excise all the bullshit, and After Earth might work as a whole. As it is, the overarching story ends without the character arcs feeling particularly earned.
Part of this is because of the younger Smith’s anemic performance. Jaden Smith can be convincing in bursts, but he remains far too stiff and detached to fill the large shoes left by his father. Will Smith’s presence doesn’t help matters; the man knows how to get a laugh from a single tilt of his head, while his son spends much energy flailing about as if he’s in a middle school dramatics club.
The lead performance and the lack of weighty payoff aren’t total deal breakers, especially by the low standards of Hollywood summer programming. In fact, after getting some laborious world building out of the way, After Earth moves at a refreshingly and enjoyably fast clip, integrating story beats and more exposition into action.
Shyamalan, with his solid grasp of formalism, handles the action well (without the leaden 3D from The Last Airbender) and occasionally delivers a stunner of a composition. It’s easily his best work in years, but that’s not saying much.
After Earth, as a whole, doesn’t amount to all that much. It’s a diverting and energetic enough popcorn flick without any substance to linger on the mind.
The only things from After Earth of lasting value are the absolutely mind-boggling meta-narratives surrounding the film. Which do you prefer: the nepotism allegations, the Scientology conspiracy theories or the grand tragedy that is Shyamalan’s career trajectory?
Even though the film isn’t awful, it’s far from a return to the beleaguered director’s glory days of The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable. Shyamalan might have just outed himself as Hollywood’s most shallow visionary.
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