Review Movie - A Father-Son Outing Goes Terribly Wrong

Columbia Pictures

A father-son encounter session tricked out with science-fiction clichés and steeped in motivational uplift, “After Earth” opens which has a teenager, Kitai Raige (Jaden Smith), washing out from some sort of ranger academy. It’s a bummer because all he wishes to do is please his father (Will Smith, Jaden’s father), a heroic if unfortunately named general, Cypher. Daddy Dearest has risen having honed tremendous self-control and a useful protective technique, “ghosting,” which renders him invisible towards the monsters plaguing human civilization: the nonbearlike Ursa.

 These shrieking creatures are introduced in a of people opening expositional heaves that filmmakers use to sketch inside the who, what, when, where and why, oh why. In this instance, the back story goes, after ruining Earth, humans relocated to Nova Prime, where they wear a great deal of white and decorate their homes with flowing sailcloths. It’s a nautical motif that winds though the movie, that was directed by M. Night Shyamalan, who wrote the script with Gary Whitta (“The novel of Eli”) from the story by Mr. Smith. There’s obviously any good nod to “Moby-Dick” shortly before Cypher and Kitai’s spaceship crashes to Earth, throwing them together for your usual and fewer-so life lessons like: “Root yourself with this present moment. Danger is very real. But fear is usually a choice.”

Casual students of Scientology might find their ears pricking up at those maxims because fear and it is overcoming obtain a lots of play in “Dianetics,” a foundational text by the creator of Scientology, the pulp science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard. “You can find five ways that they a human being reacts toward an origin of danger,” he wrote in “Dianetics.” “Forms of the 5 courses he is able to accept any given problem.” These options are attack, flee, avoid, neglect or succumb. Kitai would understandably prefer to split — 1,000 years after humans abandoned Earth, he and Dad have landed with a now seemingly pristine, healed world teeming with cawing, clawing menace and a few cute baby critters. But Cypher is made of sterner, righter, more rational stuff.

The tale takes over slowly, beat by predictable beat, from a debris storm downs Kitai and Cypher’s spaceship and they fall to Earth in a smashup that appears like someone decorated the set with wet mouthwash and plastic wrap. There, they trade bitter words, clench their jaws and check the tears amid long pauses and inert action scenes, most involving Kitai racing from the dense woods and confronting digitally rendered animals. For the most part it is really an uninteresting slog alleviated only by the occasional unintended laugh and moments of visual beauty. Mr. Shyamalan generally torpedoes his movies with overweening self-seriousness. But occasionally he offers up an image — much like a detailed-of Kitai’s face dusted with glistening snowflakes — that rises out from the torpor.

sources: http://movies.nytimes.com