Famous Flops: After Earth

 
This is the final installment of my 2013 series Famous Flops, in which I have been watching one known turkey per month and writing about it.

The trick when assessing the quality of an M. Night Shyamalan movie is not to hate on it just because it's M. Night Shyamalan. Unfortunately, the man has reached a point in his career where it's almost impossible to go into one of his movies with an open mind. You tend to jump on any little thing that strikes you as ridiculous, when you'd give the benefit of the doubt to many other films.

So I need to be honest and say that After Earth is a bit boring and bland, more than it is outright wrongheaded. In fact, Mr. Shyamalan can be said to be treading water, creatively, as far as I'm concerned. Despite some laugh-out-loud moments in its first half, I actually felt that the critically reviled The Last Airbender had some value in it. After Earth may have about the same amount of value. Which is to say, not a lot, but some.

Let's start by addressing the elephant in the room: Jaden Smith. (I don't know why he's the elephant in the room. Forget I said that.) He's not really a good actor. The temptation is to call him a chip off the old block, but he's really not. He's okay. I was most convinced by him in The Pursuit of Happyness, when he was just a little kid, then not at all in The Day the Earth Stood Still. I haven't seen The Karate Kid, or any other movies he's made. He doesn't bring it here. He tries, and it's a really sweet kind of trying, but he just doesn't bring it. And the movie relies on his acting chops quite a bit. 

You see, he's sent off to find a rescue beacon that's in the other half of the ship his father and he crashed in, some 100 kilometers off on a planet called Earth, where humans used to live. They've long since vacated, as the planet (beautiful looking though it still is) has become toxic to human life. In fact, Smith Jr. needs special breathing capsules to help him breathe, and there's a question whether he'll make it the full 100 kilometers on the few remaining breathing capsules he has, let alone get back to the other half of the ship's wreckage, where his father (Smith Sr.) is in really bad shape with two broken legs.

In every Shyamalan movie you're looking for the high concept hook that attracted him to the project, and here it's more of a backdrop: Humans aren't safe in the other places they live, either. There they are being picked off by ferocious aliens who can't see them, but can track where they are by smelling their fear. The only way to beat them is to cultivate an absolute mastery over your fear, which is what Smith Sr. has done -- at this point you can walk right up next to them and slit their throats. This makes Smith Sr. an expert in the act of what's called "ghosting," and his son a trainee.

I do like that concept, but it's really not used in an interesting enough way. In fact, much of the movie is spent on set pieces where Smith Jr. has to face a certain obstacle between himself and the rescue beacon on Earth -- few if any of which involve the whole "mastery of fear" theme. I couldn't help but think of Shyamalan's The Happening during some of these scenes, because that movie involved the deadly threat embodied in ... trees. The earth is fighting back in a similar way here, but at least most of the threats are a little less inert, and ridiculous, than they were in that film.

That's the problem with where we find Shyamalan in his career right now. He seems to have gotten over the speed bump of really ridiculous fare, which I would argue started with The Village and carried on through Lady in the Water and The Happening. The first half of The Last Airbender is pretty ridiculous, but then it gets a bit better, and I would argue that this is where we find him with After Earth: no longer ridiculous, just boring. Which might be worse.

One aspect of his craft that's definitely still suffering is his direction of actors, which could be part of the explanation for Jaden Smith's less-than-stellar performance. Shyamalan and Will Smith have made the curious decision to excise any of the cheekiness and jovial spirit of a typical Will Smith character, leaving him totally humorless and almost robotic. While I wouldn't necessarily want a reprise of Smith saying "Welcome to Earth" from Independence Day -- though it would be thematically appropriate in this film -- I do think that they have managed to eradicate one of the main reasons people want to see Will Smith in a movie. A sci fi summer release wants the movie star Will Smith, not the actor Will Smith.

The film looks decent and is made competently enough. It's just sluggish and unremarkable.

Which brings us to the rather unremarkable ending of a rather unremarkable series. That's okay. Maybe this series about flops was destined to be something of a flop itself.

Up next: Twenty fourteen will bring us a new series that's appropriate to where I now live. That's the only tease I'll give you for now, with more to follow in January.

Making Jaden Smith happen

Will Smith has spent the better part of the past decade more interested in whether his son has a career than whether he has one.

And because he is such a Hollywood heavyweight with so much muscle -- both financial, and the more abstract power of his reputation -- it's hard to say whether Jaden Smith is "happening" organically, or merely through the force of Will Smith's ... well, Will Smith's will.

Put more simply: Is Jaden Smith really a star, or is Will Smith just succeeding in telling us he's a star?

What got me thinking about this was a billboard I saw recently for After Earth, which opens today, in which neither the senior Smith's name nor his face appears. It's kind of like the one you're seeing in this picture here, except it was horizontal rather than vertical, and there was no companion billboard feature only Will's name and face. (You'd be wise to ask, however, which is the elder and which is the younger. Starting with the Seven Pounds billboard a few years back, I swear they are doing some kind of reverse aging thing on Will Smith.)

Jaden Smith's solo billboard is designed to make us think that Jaden himself can open a picture, even without his daddy. But is that real, or is it just hype?

It'd help to take a little look at his career thus far. He's only 14 (for about another month), so this should be pretty quick.

Jaden of course debuted alongside his dad in the 2006 film The Pursuit of Happyness, which I actually thought was great. I don't have a strong memory of Jaden's performance in the film, but I suspect he seemed pretty natural -- a chip off the old block, as they say. It goes without saying that Jaden would not have appeared in this film without Will ... yet I just said it anyway.

His next feature was two years later in 2008, the awful remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. And already, at not yet 10 years old, Jaden blows my theory out of the water. IMDB does not show Will Smith's name anywhere on this movie. Surely he worked his magic behind the scenes, but he wasn't so involved with the movie that he got a producer credit or anything.

Not the case for Jaden's next movie, which came out at another (parentally responsible) two-year interval: The Karate Kid in 2010. This movie probably makes the best case for Jaden being a true breakout star able to exist on his own merits, but I'll have to take other people's word for it because I still haven't seen it. And daddy definitely helped here: Both Will and Jada Pinkett Smith are credited as producers.

That brings us to After Earth, which reteams the buddy comedy duo from The Pursuit of Happyness. (That's a joke.)

Jaden got such an early start that it only feels like he's been around forever. At not even 15, Jaden probably isn't feeling desperate to get out of his father's shadow just yet. Though if I were him, I'd probably think twice about co-starring with his father again, at least not until he's in his 20s and the elder Smith is trying to make his first comeback. Time for this baby bird to spread his wings and fly.

Then and only then will we decide if this baby bird can carry his own billboard, let alone his own movie.

Of course, the elephant in the room about After Earth has nothing to do with either of the Smiths. The elephant is that After Earth is M. Night Shyamalan's latest attempt to reclaim the creative glory that has eluded him for something like six movies now. I'd say it was his last chance, but that's what I said when he made The Last Airbender, which ended up being one of his biggest flops. Yet here he is again, even though studios have long since stopped using his name to help market his movies.

So maybe Jaden catches a break here. If his movie stinks, maybe it won't be any kind of commentary on his star power after all.