Tell me a story

I live in fear. I’m afraid of feeling physical pain, my loved ones feeling any pain, dying (not death), clustered holes (unofficially known as trypophobia), being thought of as less than smart, and being thought of as less than a man. These fears dictate many of the decisions I make on a daily basis. So it would life-changing if I could turn them off the way Will Smith’s character, Cypher Raige, can in After Earth. Maybe I’d get a tattoo or perform more improv or host a party or even adopt a couple of pregnant Surinam toads. Cypher uses his lack of fear to fight giant alien monsters. Oh god, am I less than a man than him?! Probably not; we just live on different worlds.

Cypher and his family, which includes son Kitai (played by Jaden Smith) and wife Faia (played by Sophie Okonedo), live on a planet called Nova Prime. That’s where humankind migrated after leaving Earth 1,000 years ago. Why did they leave Earth? I think the opening voiceover briefly mentions some sort of vague cataclysmic event that made the planet uninhabitable.  In my research for this review I found the following graphic which explains in more detail what happened, and that’s a problem for me. Why couldn’t the movie itself have told us all these things? Sure, the details aren’t exactly crucial for the story, but being from Earth I have an interest in the fate of the planet. So explaining in more detail why it had to be abandoned would have made me more invested in the story. As you’ll see, my lack of investment is a major part of why I didn’t connect with After Earth.

What happened to Earth again?

On Nova Prime, Cypher is a General in the Ranger Corps, soldiers that protect mankind from an alien race called the S’krell who want Nova Prime for themselves. To that end the S’krell unleash giant beasts called ursas on the humans. The ursas can literally smell fear, and apparently they don’t like the odor because they try to kill anyone bearing that fear-stink. So you can see why Cypher’s ability to feel no fear, called ghosting, makes him so valuable. Cypher was the first human to ghost, and as such, every Ranger looks up to him. And no one wants to impress him more than Kitai.

When we first meet Kitai, he’s training to be a Ranger himself. Physically he’s more than qualified, but he has a defiant streak in him, which makes him less than an ideal candidate for the militaristic organization. You’d think that if he really wanted to impress his dad by becoming a Ranger, he’d conform to their rules, but he just can’t. It seems he’s got a chip on his shoulder that just won’t allow him to.  In an effort to bond with Kitai after his Ranger application is denied, Cypher takes him along on a routine off-planet training mission, but they never make it. Their spaceship ends up in an asteroid field and then crash lands on Earth. Kitai and Cypher are the only survivors (and maybe also an ursa, which was brought along to help teach the Rangers how to ghost. Oops!). Luckily there is a beacon on the ship that will send a signal to Nova Prime requesting rescue. The problem is the beacon is in the tail of the ship which broke off during the crash and is now many miles away. Oh and both of Cypher’s legs are broken.  Looks like it’s all up to Kitai to retrieve the device. And if you suspect he’s going to have to face his fears if either of them are to survive, then you would be right.

Kitai is afraid.

I did not enjoy After Earth. I wanted to. I’m a huge Will Smith fan. If Bill Cosby was like a TV father to me, then Will was my TV brother. I grew up watching the Fresh Prince of Bel Air and just about all of Smith’s movies. I’ve been nothing but happy for his success and his family’s, and so I wanted this movie to be good as much for my sake as theirs. I was initially put off by M. Night Shyamalan’s involvement as I haven’t enjoyed his films in a long time, but I was intrigued by the movie’s premise and wanted to give him a chance. Unfortunately it turned out that I could see all the turns coming before they happened, I didn’t care for any of the characters, and I didn’t worry about anyone’s fate, all of which led to a hollow experience for me.

It was particularly hard to care about Cypher, who was almost as robotic as the machines in Smith’s I, Robot. Maybe this coldness was a result of his ability to turn off his fear or a result of something devastating that happened to his family before the movie takes place. Either way, he has no personality, and that makes it hard to understand him. I didn’t know what he wanted out of life, I didn’t know if he was happy, I didn’t know if he could experience happiness. I think we see him smile once, and we see him well up in worry for his son, but that’s about all the emotion we get from him. How does a person stay married to someone like that? What does Faia even see him? I would have loved to see more of that relationship, but we get very little of it.

“Why do you love this guy?” asks audience and Faia.

We get very little of life on Nova Prime in general. We see Kitai training and failing to be a Ranger, and we see Faia talking Cypher into taking Kitai with him on the training mission and then, ka-blam! we’re crashed on Earth. It would have helped the movie immensely to have slowed down and shown us life on Nova Prime. If you tell us that humans have migrated to a new planet, then give us an idea of what life is like there. Has society had to become more militaristic to survive? How many people migrated? Are there countries? Democracies? What do the people of Nova Prime dream about? We don’t need a book report, but it’s important to give us some idea of what life is like there.

Instead the movie is too concerned with showing off its version of future-Earth and its action sequences, all of which ended up being surprisingly dull. There’s a scene with Kitai running away from a troop of baboons, and while it looked fine, it wasn’t exciting. Because you never worry for a second that Kitai will be hurt, all the movie’s action is inconsequential and thus uninteresting, especially when we don’t really see anything we haven’t already seen before.

Scary cat.

And speaking of the animals on Earth, at one point Cypher explains to Kitai that “everything on this planet has evolved to kill humans.”  Now I’ve never been confused for an expert in evolution, but it seems to me that 1,000 years isn’t that long for animals to evolve. It also seems that if humans haven’t been on the planet for a thousand years, then the wildlife wouldn’t feel such a strong instinct to kill humans. I would expect them to react with curiosity towards humans rather than aggression, which is indeed how that first baboon reacts to Kitai until he initiates an act of aggression. Much of the movie is Kitai trekking across Earth, getting chased by animals and hiding from animals, but to me most of the animals behaved in ways you would expect today’s wild animals to behave. But moving on.

It’s an interesting theory that fear is a choice. Cypher states that fear “is a product of thoughts you create.” I suppose that’s true, but how much of a choice is it really, especially when you’re facing a physical threat? It seems like a mostly involuntary reaction, and even a useful one. Perceived danger triggers our flight or fight mechanism which is extremely useful for our survival. Ghosting seems useful only in the particular instance After Earth presents, and possibly other warlike situations. Even then I think it’s probably better for people to feel fear than to not. Fear makes you cautious. Fear of losing your life indicates just how much you value that life. When characters were ghosting, their faces were emotionless, their eyes blank; there was something unhuman about the look. Personally I think courage in the face of fear is a more impressive feat than the vanquishing of fear. Fear is utterly human. Hell, it’s utterly animal. Why should I root for the loss of that? This movie never provided an answer to that. So again, intriguing theory, but because the movie doesn’t explore it as much as it could, I can’t really connect with it.

Kitai feels admiration. Cypher feels?

Not only does the movie not handle this fear-as-a-choice idea well, it drops the ball on the relationship between father and son—the other major focus of the story. While Kitai is fighting his way to the tail of the plane, he communicates with his father using a portable communicator on his wrist. I think it would have been great to see them bonding more through these blind conversations. They do address one major issue, and Cypher tells Kitai about the first time he ghosted, which turns out to be a nice dramatic moment, but those two moments just weren’t enough for me. I would have liked to have seen Cypher’s cold exterior broken more so that we could begin to see him as a person. I would have liked to see their relationship really grow. I guess I just wanted more heart.

I feel like I’m being harsh on this movie. I’ve spent most of this review pointing out its flaws, but I wouldn’t be so hard on it if I didn’t have so much faith in the people involved in this project. I almost wish I could go back in time and encourage them to work more on the script, which, as I say it, sounds horribly arrogant to my own ears, but is nevertheless true. I want these guys to succeed and I know they’re capable of more than what we got here. So for now I’ll just wait with excitement and without fear for their next projects.

My Rating

After Earth
Director: M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, Lady in the Water)
Writers: Gary Whitta (The Book of Eli), M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, Lady in the Water), and Will Smith