Crim at the Movies: After Earth

(I was going for a mega release, but since my laptop got wipped, that isn’t happening. So instead, I’ll be presenting some new movies to rant or praize. I promise not to write one every couple months now )

”Danger is real, but fear is a choice”. This is the tagline for After Earth: A movie behind the minds of Will Smith and M. Night Shyamalan with a heavy reliance on technology for the apparent success for this movie. Allow me to delve into this multi-million dollar epic and basically tell you why this movie is well...terrible.



After Earth is set in the far future where humanity has polluted the Earth to such an extent that we needed to evacuate, does that remind you of a certain Pixar movie from 2008? Humanity has settled on an earth like planet called Nova Prime, where we humans seem to be doing quite well for ourselves. Until...you know. Aliens. I won’t say anymore about the basic story in this paragraph, but if you’ve seen the trailers, it’s basically Will Smith and Jaden Smith being stuck on a planet and are trying to get off before they eventually die, average plot concept done poorly.



The plot points themselves are a bad video game. Earth gets cold, so Jaden Smith needs to reach a hotspot or else he’ll freeze to death. Earth’s atmosphere is bad, so he needs to take medication to breathe. That thing on your wrist, that’s a communication and it’s the only way he can communicate. A painkiller with bad side effects. As you watch each of them, it feels like Shyamalan is shoving crap so far up your kazoo that it feels like the audience is stupid. Of course the communicator gets broken; of course he will run out of breathing medication, foreshadowing is just ridiculous in this movie. It makes you feel like an Idiot.

Cypher Raige (Will Smith) and Kitai Raige (Jaden). When you hear that the protagonists name is "Cypher Raige", you know it’s time to walk out of the goddamn cinema. Within the first five minutes, you start to notice that the main character, Jaden Smith, is actually stupid on purpose. He’s survived a crash landing on a planet where everything can kill you; every decision is life and death, survival is a priority and so forth. So why not go throw goddamn rocks at giant killer monkeys, shout at giant predators to simply “go away” and generally disobey the orders of your superior, an extremely experienced commanding officer and your own father? Where the script writers even trying with the characters? Isn’t Kitai a solider who has undergone, considering he wants to become a Ranger, extreme physical training and survival and combat skills? Is Jaden Smith actually stupid? Christ.



Another problem is the interaction of characters. It’s just Jaden Smith wandering across a large seemingly endless Jungle, taking to stuff like Clint Eastwood talking to an empty chair, and talking to his Father who shows almost absolutely no true emotion during the entire period of the movie. Not to mention that Cypher is in another location all together, so we’re stuck with Kitai for a good 80% of the movie and Jaden’s Smith’s voice. This is almost what instantly turned me off. Jaden Smith, a teenager that sounds that has a South African accent mixed with a British accent and speaks on a similar tone as Lil Wayne. He’s extremely annoying to listen to. You’ll be lucky to even understand him in pretty much every scene of the film, since Jaden can’t annunciate.

The only good thing about this movie is the technology presented in the movie. Holographic x-ray machines, a tablet that can roll up like a cloth, a spaceship shaped like a stingray, it’s all there. Jaden himself wears a suit with an adaptable camouflage. It’s normally a brown suit, but turns black when it sees motion or turns a ghostly pale when Jaden is injured. This is really the only reason to go see this film, but dont expect anything story-wise.

This is terrible. I’m not saying that it’s unwatchable, but it’s very close.

This movie has scored One and a half out of Five Lionhearts