After Earth (2013)

Directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Starring Jaden Smith, Will Smith, Sophie Okonedo, Zoë Kravitz, Billy Campbell. [PG-13]

It is said that there is no subject that cannot be made into a good movie provided the right filmmakers and actors are involved, but even Orson Welles would have been hard-pressed making something out of a serious story featuring a character named Cypher Raige. Will Smith plays that fella as a man who has conquered fear (“Fear is not real…[it] is a choice,” he laughably intones at one point), a general of a 31st century fighting force, a thousand years after Earth was abandoned. While traveling with his inexperienced, weak-willed son, Kitai (Jaden Smith), his spacecraft crash-lands on said planet, killing everyone else aboard and breaking both his legs. So it’s up to Kitai to trek out into the wild all alone to set off an emergency beacon, under constant threat of monstrously evolved creatures that track their prey based on anxiety (infrafear?)—who knew that a thousand years was all it took for such drastic alterations to the gene pool? A cinematic disaster on pretty much every front: it’s ineptly directed, written with a tin ear for dialogue and a tin brain for science, and bewilderingly acted by the two leads with bizarre dialects and the most melodramatic style of stoicism imaginable. Its substandard CGI effects are actually the least of its problems—you’re unlikely to find a survival story that attempts a valid dramatic arc with more hollow and uninteresting protagonists. Not quite the Scien(ce fiction)tology debacle that Battlefield Earth was, but this one might actually be even duller.

11/100