Film Review: After Earth

After Earth. Rated M (science fiction themes and violence). 100 minutes. Directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Screenplay by Gary Whitta and M. Night Shyamalan.

Verdict: Deep space Smith and Son has its moments.

The first time we saw Will Smith and his (then eight-year-old) son Jaden in a film together was The Pursuit of Happyness (2006), a story about a man taking custody of his young son as he pursues his ambitions for financial security and independence. Smith Snr was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar (he lost to The Last King of Scotland’s Forest Whitaker), but the real-life father and son bond was beautifully transferred to the big screen and provided the film with a valuable layer of familial authenticity.

In After Earth, that same level of authenticity serves as both an asset and a distraction, as father and (now 15-year-old son) go head-to-head for screen time in a film that is only ever about a father and son relationship – even in spite of its far too literal, seen-it-all-before, sci-fi pretensions.

A cataclysmic environmental disaster has seen the human race abandon Earth for the planet they now call home – Nova Prime. Cypher (Smith Snr) is a celebrated general in a peace-keeping organisation that keeps the inhabitants of the new world safe from the marauding Ursas – creatures that hunt humans by sensing their fear. Kitai (Smith Jnr) is trying desperately hard to be just like his father, even though he feels responsible for the death of his sister Senshi (Zoë Isabella Kravitz), who was killed by an Ursa in their home. When Cypher and Kitai are the only survivors of a spaceship after it has crashed on the now quarantined Earth, Kitai must race against time (and the planet’s hostile predators), to retrieve a distress beacon that will save both his severely wounded Dad and himself from certain death.

Veteran cinematographer Peter Suschitzky (Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back, The Rocky Horror Picture Show) brings real class to the proceedings, especially in the penultimate, particularly impressive sequences atop a volcano, when Kitai takes on his greatest fear. They are also the only scenes in which Smith Jnr appears to be entirely comfortable in front of the camera. Smith Snr takes the sombre route all the way through, and his usual lightness of touch is sacrificed to a deadly earnest performance of one-note seriousness.

Shyamalan (The Last Airbender, The Happening, The Village, Signs, The Sixth Sense) delivers it all to the screen with occasional flourishes of originality, but his and Whitta’s (The Book of Eli) otherwise passable rites of passage screenplay is almost ruined entirely by their ‘Little Golden Book of Movie Endings’.

This review was commissioned by the West Australian Newspaper Group.