After Earth:- The big, blockbuster/only Will Smith movie for this summer. The moment I saw the trailer I wanted to watch it, and I’m sure, so did most of you. It is the usual Will Smith alone in a new earth kind of thing, but the moment you realise Jaden Smith is going to be in the movie too, everything changes. They are both great actors on their own, and they have great screen chemistry together (see The Pursuit of Happyness), so you’re rushing to the cinemas expecting this to be a very remarkable movie.
Was it? Well, I have bad news for you. You weren’t the only one expecting the movie to make a big splash the moment it was dropped; the box office was hoping for a huge turnover too. However, due to a very dramatic plummet of revenue figures (After Earth only made $27 million in its opening weekend), critics are bound to label it a flop. A well-known review site even went as far as asking Will Smith
“What the Hell happened?”
What’s sad is; the idea of the movie is great. The plot centres around an earth made inhabitable after a mass destruction. A thousand years later, a legendary army general, Cypher Raige, returns from an extended tour of duty to his estranged family, ready to be a father to his 13-year-old son, Kitai. When an asteroid storm damages Cypher and Kitai’s craft, they crash-land on a now unfamiliar and dangerous Earth. As his father lies dying in the cockpit, Kitai must trek across the hostile terrain to recover their rescue beacon, and defeat a monster that feeds on fear. Good going right?
Until you realise that, for most of the time, you would be watching only Jaden. Will Smith really does nothing but sit back in the broken ship and deliver very lacklustre speeches. Dialogue is abysmal. Suspense is supposed to be built up from flashbacks, but after a while even those feel redundant. Everything in the planet is supposed to have re-evolved to be harmful to humans, but that’s not what we see. What you see is the normal dangerous lions and hyenas. A big bird does up the ante at some point, but it ends up being an invaluable aid to his cause. There is a flying snake that pays him no mind, trees and vines that aren’t trapping his feet and releasing toxins, and gorillas that chase him en
masse only because he aggravates them. So you wonder why the movie is getting so boring and then you remember that M. Night Shamalayan directed it, the same guy behind the epic failures that were
Avatar: The Last Airbender, Lady in the Water, and
The Happening.
Well, it’s still our beloved Will Smith. I would still be rushing to the cinemas for his next release. I only hope it gets more than a 4.8/10 rating from IMBD.
Cast: Will Smith, Jaden Smith, Sophie Okonedo, Zoe Kravitz
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This article was first published on 11th June 2013
Comments (1)
After Earth:- The big, blockbuster/only Will Smith movie for this summer. The moment I saw the trailer I wanted to watch it, and I’m sure, so did most of you. It is the usual Will Smith alone in a new earth kind of thing, but the moment you realise Jaden Smith is going to be in the movie too, everything changes. They are both great actors on their own, and they have great screen chemistry together (see The Pursuit of Happyness), so you’re rushing to the cinemas expecting this to be a very remarkable movie.
Was it? Well, I have bad news for you. You weren’t the only one expecting the movie to make a big splash the moment it was dropped; the box office was hoping for a huge turnover too. However, due to a very dramatic plummet of revenue figures (After Earth only made $27 million in its opening weekend), critics are bound to label it a flop. A well-known review site even went as far as asking Will Smith “What the Hell happened?”
What’s sad is; the idea of the movie is great. The plot centres around an earth made inhabitable after a mass destruction. A thousand years later, a legendary army general, Cypher Raige, returns from an extended tour of duty to his estranged family, ready to be a father to his 13-year-old son, Kitai. When an asteroid storm damages Cypher and Kitai’s craft, they crash-land on a now unfamiliar and dangerous Earth. As his father lies dying in the cockpit, Kitai must trek across the hostile terrain to recover their rescue beacon, and defeat a monster that feeds on fear. Good going right?
Until you realise that, for most of the time, you would be watching only Jaden. Will Smith really does nothing but sit back in the broken ship and deliver very lacklustre speeches. Dialogue is abysmal. Suspense is supposed to be built up from flashbacks, but after a while even those feel redundant. Everything in the planet is supposed to have re-evolved to be harmful to humans, but that’s not what we see. What you see is the normal dangerous lions and hyenas. A big bird does up the ante at some point, but it ends up being an invaluable aid to his cause. There is a flying snake that pays him no mind, trees and vines that aren’t trapping his feet and releasing toxins, and gorillas that chase him en masse only because he aggravates them. So you wonder why the movie is getting so boring and then you remember that M. Night Shamalayan directed it, the same guy behind the epic failures that were Avatar: The Last Airbender, Lady in the Water, and The Happening.
Well, it’s still our beloved Will Smith. I would still be rushing to the cinemas for his next release. I only hope it gets more than a 4.8/10 rating from IMBD.
Cast: Will Smith, Jaden Smith, Sophie Okonedo, Zoe Kravitz
I like both will and Jaden, but I wasn’t trilled about the movie. When efizi is too much it turns out bad. So i can’t say I’m surprised.