This amounts to Will Smith’s worst performance ever – sat on his tush, delivering portentous platitudes direct to camera (“Recognise your power.
an alien Ursa, which for some reason was being transported in the cargo compartment, and is now at large in the forest.įrom this point, father and son take on quite different roles – Kitai adventures across the surface of Mother Earth, weathering outrageous fortune as he nears the site of the lost beacon, while dad sits at a computer console in the crashed spaceship, monitoring his son’s progress and issuing orders. Kitai is on a “take your son to work” day with his father when their spaceship get smashed by asteroids and they crash land on a nearby planet, one supposedly “unfit for human habitation”, where “every life form has evolved to kill humans.” Guess where? It’s our very own planet earth, now abandoned to the trees.Ĭypher’s legs have been broken in the crash, and his son is the only able-body available to trek for 100 kilometres across dangerous territory to retrieve a homing beacon that will save both their lives. Smith Senior plays the preposterously named Cypher Raige, a stick-up-the-backside military man and father to 14-year old Kitai Raige, played by Smith Junior.Ī thousand years after mankind has fled earth for colonies among the stars, General Cypher is a key figure in the defence of humanity against the monstrous alien Ursa, who can sense human fear: Cypher has learned to “suppress his fear”, which makes him effectively invisible to the aliens. In particular, it’s hard to imagine that Will Smith could have found a less appropriate actor than himself for the main role: an emotionally stilted, dramatically drained, utterly humourless caricature of a veteran military officer: a cross between Patton and Spock, but with less human charm than either. Smith senior produced the movie with his wife and Jaden’s mother, Jada Pinket Smith, and it’s based on a story written by Smith, for his son, after a family television-watching session.Īnd yet, despite Smith enjoying absolute creative control of the project from the very beginning, what’s especially curious about After Earth is how badly miscast it is.
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