After Earth!!!!

After Earth.

For what looked to be a great ensemble of producers,director and actors, After Earth looked promising and the trailer boasted a visually stunning landscape and yet another take on Earth in the future.  The film itself reads to be a Smith family orientated film outing with wife Jada Pinkett Smith in a producing role her younger brother Caleeb Pinkett producing and Will Smith producing and writer of the story the whole family is involved. Let's not also forget that Will Smith and his son Jaden Smith are also starring in the film, the only person not involved with the film is Will's younger daughter Willow Smith. Obviously the directing role is given to director M. Night Shyamalan whose film credits are of either hit films or films that have completely flopped so lets hope this is a hit for him. 

The film starts showing that the earth was hit by a environmental cataclysm so all humans left to inhabit another plant called Nova Prime. Jump 1000 years later and you see chief ranger Cypher (Will Smith) leading the fight against the monsters (Ursas) who threaten to take over Nova Prime . Learning how to suppress his feeling of fear called 'ghosting' he is able to be undetected by the Ursas and trains his other rangers to do the same thing. 

As we see his son Kitai (Jaden Smith) training to be a ranger just like his dad he doesn't make the grade and soon enough convinced by his wife Faia (Sophie Okonedo) Cypher takes his son on one last mission before he retires. As the father and son are on the aircraft it soon enough crash lands and Cypher is badly injured from the crash and Kitai is left to travel to the tail end of the craft to send a distress beacon to save them both.

The rest of the film is pretty much a basic storyline of how the son fights giant animals on Earth and finally learns how to ghost and fight off an Ursa he finds a beacon and sends the beacon into the atmosphere saving himself and his father. END. As you can tell I just gave away the whole film be to be honest I've done you a massive favour as the film itself is quite awful and another film to add to Shyamalan's list of failure films. The storyline is slow and doesn't keep you hooked or interested with the overly stupid quotes from smith like "take a knee" is just aggravating. With one scene where Cypher tells his son a story his accent changes from southern Texas to Jamaican to English and back to American it just doesn't make sense and confused me. 

The acting is wooden as Jaden Smith plays Kitai like a spoilt brat who doesn't want to do anything his father says, it's like a reality TV version of "At Home with The Smiths". Will Smith himself is just stern faced, maybe that's because his character controls his emotions well but he's just cold. And of course this has to be the film where Will Smith has been sat down for most of the film and his character is not really needed at all. 

The only upside to the film is the clever internal decor of the space craft with a mixture of wood and fabrics mixed with metal it shows the potentially futuristic renewable designs of space crafts. The weapons and technology are impressive with a single weapon that transforms the blade into other blades and can split in two is clever. 

Overall it has to be the worst film I've seen this year, at a measly 100 minutes it's short and sharp and leaves a very bitter taste in your mouth and you won't get the 100 minutes of your life back either. If you want to go and see this film at some point then by all means do so but just let me say this "I told you it was rubbish".

2/10.