After Earth (2013) Movie Review

AFTER EARTH (2013) MOVIE REVIEW 

So here we have another film starring the two smith actors, Will and Jaden Smith. Now many people, including myself, were excited for this film to see if they both still had their mojo. Though in this movie, it is extremely clear who the weakest link is. 

Our story revolves around Kitai and Cypher Raige (Jaden Smith, Will Smith) who are father and son. Set in the very distant future, humanity has been forced to evacuate Earth after aliens began to invade. Because of this, many rangers are needed to help protect their new planet from future invasions. This leads to Cypher who a general and one of the best as he has taught himself to eliminate fear as an emotion and because of this, does not feel fear as well as many other emotions. This leads to Kitai who wants to follow in his father's footsteps but always manages to fall extremely shy from it. After telling his dad that he cannot do it, Cypher decides to take Kitai with him on one of his missions. After a 1 in a million chance of crashing, Kitai and Cypher both find out that they are the only survivors and have crash landed on the now toxic and uninhabitable Earth. Now with both of Cypher's legs broken, it is now up to Kitai to go on a perilous journey to retrieve a beacon they can use to get back home. Now to be honest, I felt the plot could have been something spectacular, both unfortunately, the story itself is brought down by...well...the rest of the movie. 

The director of the film, M. Night Shyamalan, can direct excellent movies, he has shown audiences this with The Sixth Sense, but unfortunately, this movie turns out to be something in the same style of The Last Airbender. Anyway, the main problem that this flick suffers from is that the story does not make sense and is poorly paced as for a film about survival, it very rarely feels intense and not once did I care about the safety and well being of Kitai. 

Although the pacing is god awful, perhaps the acting is good right? Well for one the film only has two main actors throughout the whole movie. The second problem with this is that throughout most of the movie, we are stuck with Jaden Smith as the main protagonist. Now I'm not saying that Jaden is a bad actor, in fact, he is actually fairly talented. The problem is that I feel that this particular was just out of his league as Shyamalan obviously set him up with a role that was just to large for him to pick. To be honest, if the roles were reversed where Cypher had to retrieve the beacon and Kitai's legs were broken, I feel that it would have made the movie more heartfelt as well as interesting as Will Smith, in my opinion, would have been perfect for this role. Speaking of Will Smith, I actually thought he played an interesting character in this film as he is a man that fears nothing, though when his son is on the brink of death, you can tell that Cypher is trying to fight back both emotions of fear and despair. To sum up, the acting was about 50/50, with Will Smith being the positive and Jaden Smith being the negative half. 

To conclude, After Earth could have been Shyamalan's comeback movie but sadly, it is brought down by poor acting, a rushed story and CGI that while not terrible, it does not look realistic in the least. To sum up, After Earth was the start of the list of over hyped films that unfortunately seem to disappoint viewers all across the globe. 

RATING: 5.1/10