Review - After Earth (2013)

Starring Will Smith, Jaden smith and Zoe Kravitz.
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan.

Synopsis: A crash landing leaves teenager Kitai Raige (Jaden Smith) and his legendary father General Cypher Raige (Will Smith) stranded on Earth 1000 years after cataclysmic events forced humanity's escape. With Cypher seriously injured, Kitai must embark on a journey to signal for help, facing uncharted terrain, evolved animal species and an escaped alien creature.

I know everyone remembers The Last Airbender; its crapiness is still fresh in our memories. In After Earth, M. Night Shyamalan continues to wallow in the dark depths of mediocrity -- this time dragging Will Smith and his son Jaden along with him. At the end of this film, I asked myself, "what was the real point of this movie?" because practically nothing happened. Nothing. Nothing at all. Seeing that for most of the film, we see obvious daddy-son issues arise between the two leads, one would think it would be a lesson about bonding -- well that was hardly it. Was it about Kitai finally learning to suppress his fears doing this stupid shit called ghosting? Honestly I still don't know what this movie was trying to bring across and I don't think the director knew either. Everything was so poorly executed.

Let me break it down, After Earth is pretty much us the audience watching Will and Jaden sleepwalk through an entire movie. Well technically Will Smith doesn't walk, he just sits there in the broken ship looking all upset with his broken leg and yelling instructions to poor Kitai who has to walk a 100 kilometres to retrieve the beacon to save them. The whole excitement of this movie is suppose to take place on Kitai's journey to retrieve this object but again, nothing happens. I hardly classify Kitai fighting off tigers and monkeys as real action because it looked rather stupid and was rather short. Much of the journey is pretty much him just walking from point A to B. The only other action that surfaces in this mess of a movie was at the end when he finally retrieved the beacon and went head to head with an Ursa (alien life-form), who happened to have been let loose when their ship crashed (how convenient). I found this scene too predictable, so anti-climatic and this ghosting crap looked dumb as hell. It was like M. Night Shyamalan had no care in the world making this movie.'

There is only one word to describe the acting of Jaden and Will Smith - frigid. Quite frankly I didn't care about them and their stupid accent - they did not make this movie the slight bit interesting. The script, oh my god, the script is god awful. As I stated, there are daddy-son issues between both characters. General Cypher is there trying to be all fake strict and fake inspirational and I get to realize that he somewhat blames Kitai for the death of his daughter Senshi (Zoe Kravitz) - to which Kitai also blames himself for. I guess both characters are suppose to feel alienated from each other and then bond throughout the film. However they felt alienated from start to finish and their lack of chemistry was so painful to watch. There are flashbacks incorporated within the story so we can get to see what happened to the Raige family, especially Senshi. Unfortunately these flashbacks are so poorly done that you will not give a crap about what happened before this adventure.

M. Night Shyamalan strikes again. He made a crappy, dull post-apocalyptic movie which was worse than Oblivion. I hate everyone involved in the making of this movie.

Rating: 1/10