Wednesday, June 5, 2013

AFTER EARTH Movie Review







MOVIE BLURB IMDb:
A crash landing leaves Kitai Raige and his father Cypher stranded on Earth, 1,000 years after events forced humanity's escape. With Cypher injured, Kitai must embark on a perilous journey to signal for help.

Writers: (screenplay), (screenplay), 1 more credit »



MY REVIEW:
Sigh. I really had to think about how I wanted to review this. However, it had one main issue getting out of the gate - M.Night Shyamalan. I can honestly say that the only movies of his I liked was Sixth Sense and Unbreakable. After those - I disliked every one of them because they never truly seemed to meet their potential.

Sorry, I digressed. However, I still wanted to see this since Will Smith and his son Jaden was in it. I had hope that he would do it justice and turn my former prejudice about M.Night's work around. Now, overall I enjoyed the movie. The idea was great. His son (Jaden) was a likeable character a boy with a bit of a mind of his own. But there were some minor problems with his son's performance. Pronunciation of his lines. I get that they were trying to have an accent that made them sound otherworldly, but Jaden didn't pull this off too well. There were spots where I didn't know what he said because his 'put on' accent was way over the top. Other than that, he had the action down. The other problem I had with his character was that first he seems to be the 'buck the system' kind of kid - but after a true catastrophe he acts rather timid. However, that is a believable trait in a young boy. Will Smith's character was truly never explained. I really wanted to know him and why he'd felt he needed to leave his family to fight the Alien threat, and what he truly felt for his son. It came out eventually, but they really could've made it more powerful than it was. Now to the overall script (It's one of those moments as a scifi author I cringe - there is no way that the writer of this script was a scifi geek - why couldn't they ask me to write it, lol!). Anyway, there were tons of opportunities to make this way more intense, but that wasn't the case. The pacing of this movie was steady and a few shockers. Overall, me and my family agreed, it was enjoyable. It was not in fact the quality of movie I was used to seeing Will Smith play in. So we gave it a 3.5 out of 5 wilderbeast.

1 comment:

J.L. Murphey said...

The only other M. Night film besides those two you mentioned I liked was the movie Signs. Other those they all smell to a high state of stinky.

He starts with a good or halfway good script and destroys it. He doesn't know what he is doing as a director, or maybe he's a director with unsure directions.

I had high hopes for this film with such a great cast of characters and my heart sank when M. Night was directing. Glad I didn't waste my money to see this one.