Usually when I sit down to watch a movie that's had bad reviews, I come out of it thinking
hey, that wasn't so bad... not the case with After Earth.
It was just brutal. I knew that M Night Shayamalan had written and directed it, but was optimistic that he'd finally turned the page on all of those other junkers he's put out in recent years. I also knew that they'd left his name off the posters and previews for that very reason - to hide the fact that he's become quite terrible. I'm not sure how the film did at the box office, but you can bet that hiding his name made them a few extra dollars.
The terribleness of this one resided in it's ridiculous conveniences. Father and son live on a human settlement planet, see each other for the first time in years, take off the next day for an intergallactic trip with a monster in tow, mystery storm wrecks ship, slip through a wormhole to end up on Earth, ship crashes with everyone but father and son dead, father has broken legs, kid has to run 100 km to find homing beacon while evading monster, finds beacon and kills monster, help arrives, father and son live happily ever after. That's basically it. Save yourself the time and the cash.
The other glaring flaws were logical ones. Supposedly every single thing on earth has evolved to kill humans. But humans had long since abandoned earth... so how the fuck does that work? And if that were even true, everything on Earth would be a capable predator, which clearly isn't even true within the film itself. At night the whole planet literally ices over, except for select spots of geothermal heat. You'd think that all of the plant life would die on a nightly basis, but nah, it's all good in the morning! The monster in the movie is also blind but has the good sense to impale his victims on trees to scare people. Right...
And then comes the scene where the kid finds the homing beacon, but it won't work due to "ionic interference" in the atmosphere. So what does he do? He climbs a fucking volcano to transmit his signal THROUGH the ash cloud and into outer space.
After that gem, the signal goes up and calls for help. Within minutes other spaceships (that are a wormhole jump away from Earth) arrive and save the heroes. Apparently light speed is just forgotten entirely, and magic ensues.
It's becoming painfully apparent that Will Smith needs to stop forcing his kid down everyone's throat. He usually has better judgement in films, and this one is an example of deluding yourself into thinking you're doing something of quality, just to push your kids ahead. If the kid really will have a career, movies like this will quickly turn him into a C-list actor.
