After Earth

Wikipedia

In the future, an environmental cataclysm forces the human race to abandon Earth and settle on a new world, Nova Prime.

One thousand years later, the United Ranger Corps, a peacekeeping military commanded by General Cypher Raige, comes into conflict with alien creatures who intend to conquer Nova Prime. Their primary weapons are the Ursas: large, blind predatory multi-limbed creatures that hunt by sensing pheromones the human body secretes when scared (they literally smell fear). The Rangers struggle against the Ursas until the impassive Cypher learns how to completely suppress his fear, in effect becoming invisible to the Ursa—a technique called "ghosting." After teaching this act to the other Rangers, he leads the Ranger Corps to eventual victory.

Meanwhile, Cypher's son Kitai blames himself for the death of his older sister Senshi at the hands of an Ursa attack some years ago when he was a young child. The father and son have an estranged relationship with Cypher being away on missions. Kitai, younger and smaller than most cadets, trains to become a staunch and respected Ranger like his father. Despite his physical capabilities, his application is rejected due to his emotional behavior, and he has to break the news to Cypher, who's seemingly disappointed in him. Kitai's mother Faia convinces her husband to connect more with their son, and Cypher decides to take Kitai on his last voyage before retirement.

During space flight, their ship is caught by an asteroid shower, forcing them to transport through a wormhole to safety and crash-land on the now-quarantined Earth. Inside the torn fuselage of the ship, only Kitai (strapped to a walled row of seats) and Cypher (with both legs broken) have survived. They find the main distress signal beacon is damaged. Cypher instructs Kitai to locate the tail section of the ship, which broke off on entry to the atmosphere, since inside it is another distress beacon, which they can use to signal the Rangers for a rescue; if he fails, the pair will face a most certain death.

Cypher gives Kitai his double-bladed cutlass, a wrist communicator and six capsules of a fluid that enhances oxygen intake so he can breathe in Earth's low-oxygen atmosphere. Cypher warns him to avoid the plants and animals that have grown more deadly since humankind's departure, and to be careful of violent weather thermal shifts. Kitai leaves the ship to find the tail section with Cypher guiding him through the communicator and several camera drones. Cypher's leg is losing arterial blood and he attempts to make a temporary shunt to avoid bleeding out.

Shortly after he leaves his father, Kitai is surrounded by giant baboons. His father tells him not to move. Against his father's orders and out of fear, Kitai hits the leader with a stone, causing the baboons to give chase. Kitai manages to escape the large mammals by swimming across a river to safety, but he is bitten by a poisonous leech while in the water. Kitai administers an antidote but not before the toxins take effect and hisnervous system shuts down. When Kitai awakens, he narrowly escapes a thermal shift. Upon asking him how many breathing capsules he has left, Kitai lies to Cypher, not telling him that two of the capsules were damaged in his escape. That night Cypher tells his son the story of when he was first attacked by an Ursa. The creature tried to drown them both as Cypher fought back. He realizes that although danger itself is real, fear is a mere illusion created by the mind, and thus he learned to "ghost" himself from the Ursas.

The following day, Kitai reaches a waterfall at the top of a high cliff; he must descend to and cross the river below. Cypher once again asks him how many breathing capsules he has left. By monitoring Kitai's condition from the ship 24/7, Cypher sees his son's heart-rate increase when asked about the capsules. Kitai shows him, via the communicator, the two unbroken capsules. Cypher calculates that the only way for Kitai to continue on with just two capsules would be for him to skydive to the bottom of the waterfall with his built-in flying suit, since taking a ground route would require more oxygen.

However, Cypher will not allow Kitai to perform the skydive and repeatedly orders him to abort the mission. Believing his father still sees him as a failure, Kitai becomes angry and tells Cypher he is to blame for Senshi's death because he was absent on the day of the attack. Upset at Cypher and determined to complete the mission, Kitai leaps from the top of the waterfall's cliff to skydive to the crash site. He is ow many more kilometers he has to travel in order to reach the tail-end of the ship, taking into consideration how many capsules he has left. He reaches a river and builds a raft to continue along it, the flow taking him along to his destination. Worn and exhausted from his encounters, Kitai falls asleep on the raft, and dreams of his dead sister, Senshi. She reassures him that Cypher's bitterness is just his own anger for not saving her. Senshi urges Kitai to awaken, and when he refuses, her form suddenly shifts to an Ursa-mutilated version of herself; finally awaking him the moment another thermal shift is beginning. Slowly freezing to death from the change of temperature, Kitai collapses, seemingly succumbing to the cold.

Just before he passes out, he is seen being dragged by something unknown. Kitai awakens at dawn and crawls out from a nest of branches. He notices that the mother eagle has returned and built an enclosure around him, and had lain on top of it, to keep him warm during the night. He thanks the bird before realizing it has sacrificed itself to provide body heat and did not survive the night.

Running on his last breathing capsule, which is beginning to wear off, Kitai finally reaches the tail section and retrieves the emergency beacon, along with another communicator, another Cutlass, and more capsules. Because of electrical interference caused by an ionic layer in the atmosphere above Kitai, the communicator allows Cypher to see and hear Kitai, but not for Kitai to hear him. While exploring the wreck of the tail section, Kitai discovers that the Ursa has escaped. Kitai tries to fire the emergency beacon, but the electrical interference above him also blocks the beacon.

Kitai comes to realize this, and heads to a nearby volcano to gain height from which to fire the beacon. On the way, he finds members of the ship's crew hanging dead from trees, killed and displayed in this manner by the Ursa in order to trigger fear pheromones in any attempted rescuers. The Ursa begins to track Kitai, who reaches the volcano, where he is injured when the monster attacks. Remembering Cypher's words, to focus on the moment rather than the outcome, and Senshi's words of encouragement from his dream, Kitai is able to control his fear and "ghost" himself from the Ursa long enough to fight back. Kitai uses the Cutlass to repeatedly impale the creature to death before it could throw them both from the mountaintop. He then fires the beacon as Cypher loses consciousness and appears to succumb to his injuries.

A rescue team arrives and recovers them both. Kitai enters the medical chamber to see his father still alive while a soldier is watching the footage of Kitai defeating the Ursa. Cypher and Kitai reconcile with a salute and an emotional embrace. Kitai decides not to become a Ranger, and tells his father that he wants to work with his mother instead. Cypher agrees to join them and allows himself a laugh as the ship leaves Earth and heads back home to Nova Prime.quickly captured by a giant eagle, and his communicator is damaged.

Kitai wakes in the nest of the eagle, possibly having been mistaken as one of her own chicks, and soon finds himself in another situation: The nest is under attack by large saber-toothed cats. Kitai and the eagle fend off the hunters, luring one of the giant cats into falling through a weak portion of the nest. Kitai escapes by climbing down the nest, where he sees that despite the efforts of both him and the eagle, the chicks have all been killed.

Spending the night in a cavern with a small molten magma river for heat, Kitai plots his course and calculates h

TheNewYorker

“After Earth”: Will Smith’s Parenting Movie

 
 
 
• 
• 

The director M. Night Shyamalan and Gary Whitta wrote the screenplay for “After Earth,” but Will Smith wrote the story. He also stars in the movie, along with his son, Jaden, and the parental connection is not incidental. Though set millennia in the future, “After Earth” is very much about life today—an allegory of the transition from being a helicopter parent to a free-range one—and it introduces an impressive array of futuristic paraphernalia to make the point.

The action is set a thousand years after humanity had to evacuate a despoiled Earth for a distant solar system, to which the species has adapted. Mankind’s main obstacle is a monster race, called Ursa, which is blind and detects its human prey by smell—literally, by the scent of fear, as it emerges in the form of pheromones. Only those who have no fear have a chance of slaying an Ursa; that phenomenon of undetectable fearlessness is called “ghosting.” Will Smith, as the military commander Cypher Raige, has it. His son, Kitai, a cadet seeking promotion to ranger, only aspires to it. Father and son are passengers on a flight to another planet when their spacecraft gets caught in an asteroid storm and is forced to crash-land on Earth. Cypher and Kitai, apparently the only survivors, need to send a rescue signal with a special transmitter that’s in the tail of the shattered craft, a hundred kilometres away. Cypher broke both of his legs, and so Kitai must make the journey alone.

It’s not giving away too much to explain that the futuristic technology (which is imagined thinly but with verve) involves a “Naviband,” a device strapped to Kitai’s forearm that allows Cypher to see everything taking place around the young man and to communicate with him—in effect, a super cell phone—and that the drama kicks into high gear when it’s disabled and Kitai has to make his way through Earth’s dangers on his own. The future features advanced versions of other contemporary child-safety paraphernalia, such as the EpiPen and the asthma inhaler.

Kitai’s journey of initiation, subject to a set of rules (each inhaler lasts twenty to twenty-four hours; he has six inhalers; each leg of the journey takes a certain amount of time…), plays out like a live-action video game, and, as the movie progresses, new rules present new challenges, their changing demands even posted on-screen in the protagonists’ video arrays. Whether or not the similarity is intended, it’s worth noting—as I discovered just now by clicking around on IMDb—that the co-scenarist Whitta “was editor of PC Gamer for several years,” as well as a writer for the games “Prey” and “The Walking Dead.” It’s an aesthetically neutral matter regarding the film (though these elements do seem foregrounded in a way that is occasionally unintentionally comical), but I wonder if there’s an actual “After Earth” game on its way. I suspect it would be a lot more fun than the movie itself.

“After Earth” is also an allegory of the family business, a public affirmation that Will Smith is yielding the spotlight to Jaden and letting him run free as an actor. Since Jaden spends much of his time on-screen as the only person in the frame, the responsibility of performance does fall squarely on his young shoulders.

Unfortunately, Jaden, though agile and skillful, isn’t a charismatic actor; he doesn’t put a lot of personality into the part, and he doesn’t have a deft way with the dialogue. Meanwhile, Will Smith doesn’t give himself very much to do, and what he does do is close to a parody of set-jawed war-movie determination. As drama, “After Earth” offers no surprises; as action, it’s rarely stimulating (there’s exactly one shot—from Kitai’s point of view as he’s being dragged to safety by a hidden benefactor—that reflects visual imagination); as a parenting manual, it seems that Will has thrown Jaden into water that’s a little too deep. For all the free-range plotting, Will does play a large role in the movie, suggesting all too clearly that Jaden isn’t quite ready to go as far out on his own as the story suggests Kitai must.

Of course, it’s too soon to tell what kind of acting chops, what kind of allure beyond the childhood cuteness of “The Karate Kid,” Jaden Smith has. He may prove to be formidable, but I suspect that to become so, he’ll need to work in a wider range of movies, perhaps a smaller scale—movies that allow him to cultivate on-screen relationships with a variety of actors, including ones his own age, and away from his father’s spotlight and counsel.

As for Shyamalan, his direction is impersonal, efficient, and clean—even too clean, resulting in an action film that doesn’t move. It’s worth comparing his blandly clear images with the kinetic frenzy that the director Gary Ross, working with the cinematographer Tom Stern, created for “The Hunger Games.” I wonder whether the placid stolidity of “After Earth” is intended to showcase the actors as if in a picture gallery—a sort of favor returned or service rendered. (Andrew Stewart reports in Variety that “It was [Will] Smith who hand-picked Shyamalan to direct ‘After Earth.’ ”)

I’ve seen a couple of reports (here and here) speculating that “After Earth” is inspired by Scientology. I don’t know about that, but I do know that Will Smith performs with an unappealing and constrained earnestness. The movie offers no trace of Will Smith, the mercurial and hearty comedian, or Will Smith, the introspective and fierce dramatic actor of “Ali.” I have no idea whether it’s dogma, paternal sentimentality, or mere actorly choice that burdens him in “After Earth,” but the result is the diminution of a superb performer, his self reduced to a celebrity emblem that advertises the movie from within.

Full Movie on PutLocker