After Earth

The biggest surprise to be found in After Earth is unveiled during the credits when you learn the movie was directed by M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN!!!!!! You would think he is in the witness protection program with how invisible he has been during the promotion of this movie and its advertising.

Jaden Smith stars as Kitai Raige – a young military ranger in training. It’s about 1000 years after Earth was abandoned by humans. We ended up on a new planet, but aliens were quite unhappy with us just moving in and taking over the place, so they have developed evil monsters, Ursas, who track humans by smelling our fear (they could have just built some casinos, that seems to work, too).

It turns out Kitai’s Dad, Cypher (Will Smith), is the king of killing these Ursas and walks around with people fawning all over him like he is some combination of Sully, Michael Jordan and George Clooney. However, Dad and Son don’t really get along, so Cypher decides to bring Kitai on his last mission before retirement.

Of course, the transport vehicle hits an asteroid field, and they crash land on Earth, where everything on the planet has evolved to the point where it wants to kill any human it faces!

Can Kitai and Cypher work together to find the device that sends a rescue beacon?

Did I mention the spaceship also was carrying one of those Ursa things, and it got loose?

I wasn’t kidding about M. Night Shyamalan being the biggest surprise. The rest of After Earth is so predictable and flat, we aren’t shocked about anything else.

OK, I was shocked once. You should hear the crazy accents all of the characters have when they open their mouths! It’s so silly, it becomes distracting.

Shyamalan has each character, maybe even that crazy Ursa thing, speaking in some weird British-type accent. I know it is likely humans 1000 years from now will develop new accents, but this is the same director who wanted me to believe trees could start poisoning human beings in The Happening, so I know he is willing to stray from reality if he thinks it will make the movie better.

Then, After Earth is a very straightforward action movie without enough action. Shyamalan and co-writer Gary Whitta (based on an idea from Will Smith) try to develop some sub-plots about the Father and Son relationship and some emotional stuff around all of that, but it never rises above the status of killing time. Sure, Will Smith has a couple moments where we can admire him showing us how Cypher wants to remain unemotional and tries to fight off some tears, but Leonard Nimoy cornered the market on the whole no emotions thing, so he should have dove into the emotional pool to liven up After Earth.

Meanwhile, Jaden Smith is not enough to carry the movie. He’s not a horrible actor, but he doesn’t have enough charisma to overcome some bad special effects and a weak script. I never feel captivated by him.

Overall, After Earth is just an OK movie. It’s not a good movie. It’s not a bad movie. It just is there. It’s mostly boring and all of the action scenes need to be amped up.

Most of all, make sure you don’t bring kids. It’s rated PG-13, and I was sitting next to a 6-year old little girl who was so frightened by it all, she was hiding her eyes, pulling her shirt above her head and crying the whole time.

After Earth is rated PG-13 for sci-fi action violence and some disturbing images.