After Earth
starring Jaden Smith, Will Smith, Sophie Okonedo, Zoë Kravitz, Isabelle Fuhrman, David Denan and Kristofer Hivju
screenplay by Gary Whitta and M. Night Shyamalan
directed by M. Night Shyamalan
Rating: ♦♦◊◊◊
Based on a story by Will Smith and developed by his own production company Overbrook Entertainment, After Earth was actually a bit boring. I expected it to be better. A thousand years in the future humanity has abandoned Earth which became unlivable because of environmental decay. Now humans live on a moon of some super gas planet farther out in the solar system. But they encounter belligerent aliens. So a military corps exits to fight the aliens and protect the human colonies. Will Smith is General Raige, commander of the Ranger Corp. A shuttle carrying General Raige and his teenage son (Jaden Smith) is damaged by asteroids and has to make an emergency landing on Earth, which is considered too dangerous to inhabit. The shuttle breaks up in the atmosphere and only the General and his son survive. An emergency rescue beacon is in the tail section of the craft which crashed a hundred kilometers away from the front section continuing the survivors. The General is injured so Jaden Smith has to travel on foot a hundred kilometers through the wild to reach the emergency beacon. Along the way he has to avoid and survive the most dangerous threat of them all, an alien creature called the Ursa, which is blind but which can smell the hormones produced by human fear. In other words, it can smell our fear.
This is the second film (the first being The Pursuit of Happyness) that stars real-life father and son Will and Jaden Smith. I haven’t watched it. Maybe some day.