Film Friday: After Earth (2013)

After Earth came out in 2013 during the summer of bombs when a series of films with weak scripts and political agendas did their best to repel audiences. After Earth was one of these. But despite its weak script that does feel like a Scientology indoctrination film at times and some bizarre choices, this film was watchable. It didn’t suck.

Plot

After Earth starts with you the audience trying to figure out if Will Smith’s son is retarded: “Wow! Is that really how he talks?” I’m sure other things are happening, but that’s all you’ll notice. Within a few minutes, however, you realize that his dialect was intentional because Will Smith and some of the others speak the same way. Their speech pattern is best described as Foghorn Leghorn without the charm and minus about 40 IQ points. Apparently, the folks from Deliverance are the only ones who survive the robot holocaust.

Anyway, there are these monster things. And they are hunting humans because humans moved to their planet after we rich white Republicans destroyed the Earth with our factories and stuff. So humanity went multi-ethnic... minus the Asians who apparently all died of acceptable racism before this film takes place, and our little chocolate rainbow of inbreedery moved out into space to some alien world picked by these noble warriors, “the Power Rangers United Ranger Corps”, who are infallible... except that they picked this crappy monster planet and the fact they can’t really protect us from these monster thingies. But they are infallible.

The leader of the Rangers is Will Smith, who plays General Writer-Producer Cypher Raige (yeah, seriously). Smith is the baddest of the bad because he has learned to wipe out his fear. See, the monsters hunt us by sniffing our pheromones, which we let out when we are afraid. //chuckle chuckle Just the tiniest bit of fear can kill you. But if you can learn to never fear anything, then you can do what is called “ghosting,” which makes you invisible to these monster thingies. Then you can kill them easily with your pointy stick, which is the height of military technology.

As our story opens, poor Will Jr. is failing out of Ranger school. He’s good in the books, but really weak in the field. His father does not understand this because old Will Sr. is emotionally dead and probably blames (in a non-emotional way) Will Jr. for not saving Mrs. Will Sr. when a monster attacked the home. “Sigh My son is a dud.”

After Will Jr. is told he sucks, he and his father hop on a space flight to somewhere. No, it doesn’t matter where, because that’s not the point. In the cargo hold of the spaceship is one of these monsters. They are transporting it for the sake of the movie. Of course, the Indian cabbie pilot flies too close to an asteroid storm and they get whacked. To save the ship, they wait for Will Sr. to tell them to hit the “travel” button which sounds like space jump technology. A moment later, they are hit, then they jump, then they crash.

Surprise, you’re back on Earth, sucka!

Now, as an interesting aside, Earth seems to have been turned back into a paradise, though this goes unremarked in the film. It’s lush and beautiful and visually stunning. Real estate is dirt cheap too. The only catch is that there are some bugs and animals who are dangerous to humans (unlike now) and Will Jr. can’t breathe the air without sucking on a pacifier.

Once on the Earth, we are told that Will Sr. has a broken leg so he needs to send his wuss kid 100 km away to light off a beacon. Of course, the monster survived the crash too and it’s hungry for chicken boy, who spews pheromones like an Italian army in full retreat. Still, they have no choice, so Will Jr. heads on out.

Ok, everything you’ve read up to now is the essentially backstory and set up. This has taken about 10 minutes of the film. The next ninety minutes or so involve Will Jr. running 100 km before his air runs out and before the monster eats him. Will he light the beacon? Will he save Will Sr.? Will he overcome his humanity and make himself emotionally dead so he can kill the creature? That’s your movie.

Huh

As strange as this may sound, this film doth not suck. M. Night Shyamalan directed this and he’s pretty good with things like pacing and images. The story itself is uber-simple, but not offensive or stupid. It’s just a boy racing through the woods as he’s hunted by a monster and runs into all kinds of obstacles. At that level, I can’t really complain. The film was pretty and it was just exciting enough to be watchable. It wasn’t ever truly exciting or all that interesting, but it was watchable.

Beyond this, they tried to inject a very standard “boy must reconcile with his father” story, but that part was very, very weak. Not only are Will Smith Jr. and Sr. not really up to the task of an emotionally serious task like this, but there are some flaws which made this an impossible task. The problem is this: the film posits that the highest state of being is to be emotionally dead. So to survive, Will Jr. needs to get off his lazy, incompetent butt and learn to surrender his emotions. That’s going to make it really hard to tell an emotionally strong story if the goal of his character is to become cardboard. Even worse, the guy he’s playing off of is already cardboard. So that’s a problem.

Then it gets worse. To inject the father-son drama, the film tells us that Will Sr. needs to stop being so distant and so (non-emotionally) angry at his son. This is a cliché father-son storyline, but it doesn’t make any sense here. Are we to believe that being emotionally dead is a good thing or a bad thing? It seems to be a good thing for Jr. but a bad thing for Sr. We’re told this is the ultimate goal of humanity, but it obviously has ruined two lives. So what is it? Even worse, why doesn’t the film recognize this problem and resolve the conflict? Worse yet, neither Will Sr. nor Will Jr. is up to handling this paradox. Consequently, their relationship sputters and stalls and jumps in multiple directions at once. Moreover, a low-dialog film like this requires the actors to project their emotions and thoughts more so the audience can understand them, yet neither actor is very good at that, especially with both trying to play emotionless drones, and with neither actor even in the same location. Each of these choices really undercuts the storyline and makes it uninteresting.

Anyway, as with Oblivion, this film was better than you would expect given its 11% rating from the critics. Also like Oblivion, this feels like an adult science fiction story in many ways, for which I’m always thankful. But unlike Oblivion, this one isn’t. This is just a "chased by hillbillies monster" movie combined with a flat "father-son reconciliation" story. There’s really no science fiction to it except as the setting. Still, the end result was surprisingly watchable, though I wouldn’t call it interesting. Ultimately, I would say that if you watch it, it will hold your attention, but you won’t remember a thing about it the moment the credits start.