After Earth
One Saturday afternoon I found myself standing in line behind sweaty, fat American moviegoers. Most were there to see Man of Steel- they were empathic and strangely patriotic enough about that- others World War Z, with a little less emphasis but doubled down patriotism in the face of zombies.
I was there to see the new M. Night Shyamalan train wreck. I was going to watch it like these samey, complacent moviegoers would slow down and rubber neck a real train wreck. And laugh.
I missed The Happening in theaters, but I sure as shit wasn’t going to miss After Earth. I even waited several weeks for word to spread, as it sometimes does with Shyamalan but sometimes doesn’t because, well, people are stupid sometimes. If I was going to be a public jackass, guffawing in a curled-up fetus position on the theater floor I wanted to be around compatriots. Either people who knew it was bad, knew there is not a snowflake’s chance in Jack Frost’s personal hell this movie could be good- OR- people who didn’t know any better. And there’s no excuse for that, weeks upon weeks after release- and years after The Happening- to not know the new M. Night Shyamalan movie is putrescent and bad not anything nice.
Despite this, apparently the Internet hasn’t caught on, or perhaps good ole Mississippi laziness and gullibility has reached such a pinnacle of perfection there is no stopping it when it comes to Will and Jaden Smith. They blindly paid cash money to see AfterEarth and I don’t feel a damn bit sorry for them when- ta da!- it sucks.
There was a couple in front of me who were two tickets too short of getting into Man of Steel before it sold out- that’s a bummer summer- and opted, after they asked the teller to list off each and every movie playing, and the show times- which all but one were hours away- before eventually wavering for ten minutes between going home and After Earth. They did not pick wisely. I scoffed and said “Ok... this is going to be good.”
They were rude, incommoding and selfish. And they got what they deserved.
The teller looked at me with pure incomprehension and pity when I asked for a ticket to After Earth, immediately after trashing it openly in front of two strangers. His wide eyes seemed to ask “Are you sure?” It was like the plea a hero gets when, wounded and unable to go on, he stays behind to ensure the escape of the others. I know in his heart he wanted to sell me a ticket to something good, but there was nothing he could do.
I wasn’t long sitting inside before the commercial onslaught began, and good gracious alive those commercials were so disgustingly bad I was seriously considering leaving before After Earth even fucking started. Think I’m exaggerating, just to be funny? There is a documentary of a commercial, longer than the commercial itself, which completely disregards or was never aware of the irony of being pretentious and artsy-fartsy about a commercial in the first fucking place. Then I get to see the commercial! That’s some selfish bullshit and I won’t even do the product or the company the honor of mentioning their names. A lot of dancing, epileptic hipster break dancing one asshole is the worldwide master of. If they were shooting for the elusive but bank worthy dumb-and-pretentious-about-it dollar, I hope they got it, because they lost my business. Lost it forever.
After the trailers for future bad movies made their twenty minute funeral procession, After Earth blessedly started. If I’m about to see a movie I know full well is going to be horrible, perhaps even traumatic, and the commercials and trailers are forcing me to second-guess my existence in a world that condones them, something is wrong.
So when did the laughs start? Well, the movie farts itself into life with Will and Jaden crashing on a star ship, and then cuts to Jaden- who got beaten somehow during the cut and now feels compelled to narrate a prologue of the crash, then forgets about narrating anything at all and just lets another prologue go on about its business with the crash that started the movie a full THIRTY MINUTES AWAY.
What’s in these prologues? Earth gets trashed by stock footage of factories and wars, so humanity moves to another planet where monsters evolve to specifically kill humans, through some equilibrium punctuated with question marks that would be plot holes if they weren’t written in crayons. These monsters- called Ursas- are good at killing people where lions, tigers and bears aren’t because they can smell fear. They “literally see” people through smelling fear. That’s important. They don’t understand people, or any other sense “see” might have, but damn it they can see fear like infrared shame.
Will Smith ain’t got no fear, which is appropriately called “ghosting” because any memory of emotion or acting might as well be a ghost when it comes to his performance. The Ursa suck at killing Smith, but Smith sucks at making an interesting character, so, you kinda want the Ursa to be good at smelling shit so they can hunt him down and scare it out of him or at least make him act.
His name is Cypher Raige.
Despite all this, I’m trying hard not to laugh. I want to be polite. But there comes a time when even the best of us crack, and it happened to me when Smith Senior scolds his son for not saying sir at the dinner table. Jaden pouts and Mrs. Raige convinces Smith to take Jr. on a trip. Shyamalan should know that if he wants me to care about Jaden Smith in any capacity he has to overcome Jaden’s rapping with Justin Bieber about bullies. Shyamalan says fuck it.
On the ship there’s an Ursa in a Nerf Egg and Jaden tries to “ghost” but spazzes, which makes a couple in the theater spaz when I laugh at him, then them, then at Jaden again when Smith appears like a teleporting buzzkill. Jaden spazzes a lot in this movie, so much so I’m going to call him Spaz Raige.
The ship goes through a meteor shower, warps through it but some ice crystals follow for no apparent reason because they don’t cause the ship to crash. It just fucking falls apart. Smith anticipates this for an equally implausible reason and decides to land on Earth.
First, naming a movie After Earth when Earth is the main setting is so stupid it’s like mud riding through quicksand in a go-cart. Second, Earth is a Quarantined Class 1 Planet of Instant Death, illegal to land on although Smith and Spaz are never punished for that. Third, every animal, from some baboons who can’t cross water like fucking Nazgul to a leech that sucks whatever dignity and pride Bieber left Jaden right out him in a scene so funny it took days off my life, has evolved, like the Ursa, to “kill humans”.
Humans haven’t been on Earth for a long time, yet every animal continues to evolve as if we were still there, or were merely waiting for Earth to recover, our mass evacuation a damnable lie. I was expecting much of the hilarity in this movie to be how these animals evolved to kill a ghost species that itself hasn’t evolved in this ridiculous arms race with light years of distance between them.
There is no animal on Earth that shows any skill, adaptation, or anything to kill humans that any other animal with claws could do just as well and probably better. If these animals were evolving while Earth was going kaput and made us leave in the first place, why aren’t we extinct- AND- if these wussy ass baboons and leeches are all we have to worry about, why the hell is Earth a QUARANTINED CLASS 1 PLANET OF INSTANT DEATH? AND, considering these highly specialized animals, which by the way can’t eat each other because they haven’t adapted to their own environment, and also suck at killing JADEN SMITH, why are we engaged in a life-or-death battle with these highly dangerous fear-smelling Ursa when we can just plop back to Earth lickety split and nuke the baboons, leeches, eagles and lions from orbit like a smart bomb from God?
Anyway, Spaz has to go to the ship’s tail, which crashed some distance away, to get an emergency beacon so they can get rescued in five minutes. It’s a bold rescue, sending unarmed paramedics to Earth to get two warriors with shape-shifting spears. Smith has his leg broken, the only injury he’s sustained after getting sucked out of a space ship miles above the surface and landing flat on his ass. He sends Jaden on this mission with a camera crew so he can direct him.
Spaz throws rocks at a baboon and it Raptor barks at hundreds of other baboons who were chilling but when they hear “Jaden Smith” come calling with a vengeance. I guess they evolved to kill humans by spontaneously generating other baboons off-screen, but haven’t evolved to swim, because Jaden hops in a river and they shrug off and leave.
Then Spaz gets sucked on by aforementioned leech. I guess the evolution the animals underwent is a hierarchy of talents, the baboons able to summon their entire species together at once but no match for flippers and a goggle mask. At which point they let the leech have his chance at glory, but he hasn’t evolved a poison Spaz doesn’t have an antidote for in his knapsack, especially for this one leech who apparently has a generic poison specifically designed to be a minor nuisance to a basic First-Aid kit. He takes an antidote and sleeps, along with the audience, while Smith broods and has memories.
Spaz also has memories of his sister getting killed by an Ursa. It’s maybe the funniest scene. She gets thrown against a wall and bounces off broken and dead. And it’s shown twice, maybe three times, to make me feel sorry for her I guess but some jokes never get old.
Spaz doesn’t have long to nap on set however, because Earth has also evolved to kill humans along with every warm-blooded creature because it freezes overnight. There’s a few “hot-spots” which stay warm enough to live in, and Jaden finds one unoccupied, because I guess all the critters would rather die a slow icy death than hang out with him.
Before the Earth freezes, the wind blows throw the plants and they fold in on themselves. Oh no! Run little Jaden! It’s the WIND! The baboons and leeches didn’t get you, but that wind will for sure.
Then Will Smith tells a story. And let me tell you, this story is the turning-point of the movie. This story caused something so grand, so unforgettably funny and priceless, even Shyamalan would be proud. For three minutes at least, the camera stays on Smith, rambling about “ghosting” for the first time in a monotone so dry everyone in the theater who has a drink is gulping it down. The Ursa stuck its claw in him, and he did not want it there. It goes on, and on, and then....
An old man sitting two rows in front of me puts on his straw hat. Every eye looks at him, but he’s lost in an rage, down with Hollywood and especially Will Smith. He throws his bag of peanuts on the floor, cocks his head back like a rooster about to crow Jonestown into a dark morning, and says, I quote:
“Well I’ve had enough of this goddamn boring shit.”
He stands up- I really want to do a slow-clap but I’m too emotional- readies his walker and staggers out, stomping the rubber stops of his walker into the carpet to punctuate a no-doubt heinous inner dialogue he’s too despondent to utter.
I waited until he was gone, and the laughter flowed with joy, everyone- expect the couple who spent their life savings on After Earth and were going to enjoy it no matter- erupting in uncontrollable hysterics, with Will Smith still rambling on like a pirate radio with only one sad song. The couple grows angry, they’ve had enough, and they get up and leave. And then I slow-clap, and the audience slow-claps with me.
God bless that old man. I like to think he made his way to the ticket booth and demanded his money back with the hardcore ultimatums only the old can make. Sore at being tricked into a bad movie, maybe the only movie he got to see that week- and I don’t blame him, movies aren’t often worth the effort- and it’s After Earth. I’m sorry he suffered, he probably lost his faith in movies generally and certainly Will Smith completely, but he brought a light of happiness into my life I will never forget.
Thank you old man, whoever you are.
He broke the ice, and from then on everyone laughed, at everything, all the time. It was uplifting. No one talked to anyone, but we all knew we were together, enjoying a bad movie as a bad movie and having much more fun than the people sweating and gobbling greasy butter in Man of Steel.
The rest of the movie you’ll have to see for yourself. Is it bad? Yes. Is it funny? Yes. Did I like it? Of course. I’m the biggest fan M. Night Shyamalan has, and I’ll be there to see any movie he makes. I only hope that old man is somewhere in the theater with me, and Shyamalan’s next movie isn’t “goddman boring” enough to make him leave before it’s over.