Film review: 'After Earth' looks like a Will Smith family portrait gone horribly wrong

Film: After Earth 
Cast: Jaden Smith, Will Smith, Zoë Kravitz
Director: M Night Shyamalan
Rating: **

Fear is the constant emotion through the 100-minute run of Will Smith’s idea of a father-son story set against the backdrop of an apocalyptic world. But it is a different sort of fear.

A fear that rises from knowing that one of Hollywood’s biggest names has conceptualised this project and is working with a director who has strayed away from his style of film making over the last few years.

Nonetheless, the biggest apprehension lies in being able to look beyond the baggage that comes with the lead pair’s star status.

Like every futuristic film, After Earth has its fair share of planets, galaxies, creatures and technical mumbo jumbo. Smith plays Cypher Raige an army commander who leads a team that includes his son Kitai (Jaden) into a training mission that ends with their spaceship crash landing on Earth.

1,000 years into destruction, earth has been wiped out of any human existence and classified as a planet incapable of habitation.

Over the next one hour, we watch a paralysed Will giving instructions to his son to recover a ‘beacon’ and watch out for a Ursa monster that looks like a leftover CGI product from Clash of the Titans.

The second half only has the father-son duo interact with each other through voice overs with flash backs to earlier moments in their life.

On a positive note, there are a few scenes that impress — the baboon chase, Kitai’s mid-air flight and the predictable yet ‘oh-god-he didn’t’ climax make up for the lack of a plausible storyline.

The background score and cinematography are impressive. Dialogues are cringe worthy and sound like rejected drafts from a Paul Coelho book. There is this long drawn monologue where Will talks about fear.

“Danger is very real, but fear is a choice!”, he says. Yet we somehow fail to share his sentiment. Most of the screen time is spent on tight close-ups of Will and Jaden with the latter being reduced to attempting strange acrobatics with his eyebrows in every alternate frame.

After Earth looks like a Smith family portrait that’s gone horribly wrong. We recommend you revisit The Pursuit of Happiness to watch this father-son jodi at their best.