We learn that, having ruined our environment, humans decamped en masse to Nova Prime, which would have been a nice place if not for the monsters that had been bred to kill humans. They must be saving an awful lot for comic book and video game spinoffs, though, as the film squeezes its millennium-long setup into a few short moments of voiceover introduction. Plans for such a franchise seem to be afoot, with filmmakers reportedly having written “1,000 years of backstory” for these two characters and their society. Will Smith’s presence, not just as costar but as originator of the story, seems likely to carry box office receipts beyond the benchmark of Shyamalan’s previous picture, the wretched The Last Airbender, but those hoping for a franchise should navigate elsewhere. The disappointingly generic film, which strands a father and son ( Will and Jaden Smith) on Earth a thousand years after a planet-wide evacuation, will leave genre audiences pining for the more Terra-centric conceits of Oblivion, not to mention countless other future-set films that find novelty in making familiar surroundings threatening. Night Shyamalan‘s sci-fi survival tale whose shipwreck action could (with the exception of a scene where our hero scrawls a crude map over Lascaux-like cave paintings) take place on any old life-supporting globe in the cosmos.
Stop.Humanity’s home planet hardly merits the name-check in After Earth, M. It’s not a good sign when you sit there thinking – Make. The burden of carrying this dull, lifeless movie is just too much. Whaat? The young Smith has energy, but not the acting chops. So what we have here is a Will Smith, devoid of humor, charm and screen time, waiting in the car while his kid does the driving. If you’re thinking this movie won’t be going where you think it’s going, snap out of it. This means he sits around staring at computer screens while sonny boy does the heavy lifting, running a 60-mile obstacle course to another part of the ship’s wreckage to recover a beacon that will save the day and both their lives. When a spaceship crash strands Cypher and Kita on Earth, the boy must become a man. What can bring father and son together? A disaster, of course. OK, he’s a general, but you take my point. Kitai can’t even cut it in the United Ranger Corps, where his father is considered a God. No wonder his son, Kitai Raige (Jaden Smith), can’t get close to him. Daddy Smith plays Cypher, the militarist leader of Nova Prime, the planet where humans live after they destroyed nature’s balance 1000 years ago. Night Shyamalan (a galaxy away from the glory days of The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs), is an unholy mess of platitudes and posturing that makes 90 minutes drag on like a life sentence. What we see on screen, with a sodden script co-written by Gary Whitta and director M. So what are Will Smith, 44, and his son Jaden Smith, 14, doing there? Ask Big Willie, he dreamed up the story. This time poor, ravaged Earth, uninhabitable by humans, is occupied by predatory birds, monkeys and tacky computer-generated aliens. After Earth merits comparison with 2000’s Battlefield Earth, John Travolta’s godawful film tribute to the sci-fi novel by Scientology founder L.
0 kommentar(er)
