AFTER EARTH
Genre: Sci-Fi Fiction
I'm going to be right up front and say the very first few minutes of this movie made me uncertain if I even wanted to watch it. I believe in living with nature, but I am not a "bunny hugger". This movie started out with an environmentalist theme and it put me off. Later my son told me he thought about getting up and going and asking for his money back, but then he remembered we were seeing it for free.
As a family we believe everyone has a right to their own opinions about the environment, but no one has a right to shove their beliefs down the throats of others, so when movies start off blaming humans for every problem in the universe it leaves a bad taste in our mouths.
Luckily for the movie makers that one reference was all they made to the environmentalist movement. So we stayed to watch the movie. Or maybe it’s not so good for M. Night Shyamalan, because this review is not favorable for it.
The premise of the movie, if you haven't gathered it from the movie trailers filling the airways, is that man destroyed the environment and had to flee the planet. The new planet they went to was infested with man destroying beasts, called "Ursa" that were planted there with the sole purpose of hunting man down and killing him by tracking him by the fear pheromone.
This is where the movie becomes disjointed and starts to move erratically. Had they followed this story line a bit more the rest of the movie may have been more interesting. One brief glimpse of Will Smith, who plays the father, Cypher Raige, walking or, "ghosting" as it is called in the movie, all around the creatures without being detected is all you truly get of the battles with the Ursa.
Let’s stop here and discuss the names, which were for the most part not understandable when the characters spoke them, in this movie. First of all the name of the movie to begin with After Earth, it did NOTHING to describe the movie.
The there is Will Smith’s character’s name, that quite frankly none of the three of us viewing the movie could make out what in the world they were calling him during the whole movie. I had to look it up on the net to find out it was Cyper Raige. What type of name is that?
Jaden Smith’s, Will’s actual son, is named Kitai, at least that one we could understand as Will Smith said it often and loudly in the movie.
The only two other characters that seemed to have names in the movie were the mother Faia Raige and the deceased sister Senshi Raige.
Then of course there is Ursa, the creature. Ursa was a she bear in ancient times, but this thing looked nothing like a bear and they called it both he and she in the movie.
That wasn’t the only continuity problem we found in the movie, IF you should decide to see this movie you will see that even when running through a planet with no shoe stores Jaden Smith changes shoes, more than once. We weren’t looking for continuity problems, but this and others jumped out at us. We are fans of continuity in our movies and dislike glaring problems with it.
One HUGE continuity problem was the fact the movie was NOT what the trailers lead you to believe. I cannot tell you the reason I say this without ruining the movie for you die hard Will Smith fans. So I’ll stop there.
As you have probably already guessed by all I have typed, the rating on this movie is not very high in this family. The three of us voted, the votes ranged from a C to a low B in our household.
My recommendation, if you are going to see only one movie, this shouldn’t be it, maybe after it comes out on Netflix, but not before then. Of the two movies we saw Saturday, “Iron Man III” was far better. You can read my review of it here.
Jan who is certainly glad she didn’t pay to see After Earth in OK
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