Culture

Rating: 2.5/5

M. Night Shyamalan has had a roller coaster of a career, from the unadulterated success and cultural penetration of The Sixth Sense to his ultimate demise with the painful The Happening and the destruction of the much-loved Avatar with The Last Airbender. Frankly, he has become a bit of a joke due to his overuse of twist endings. His latest film After Earth may not redeem the once-great director, but at least it is a step in the right direction.

After Earth, starring Will and Jaden Smith, is a sci-fi action film that tells the story of a father and son fighting for their survival on an abandoned Earth after their ship crash lands. The story is un-convoluted and well structured, but is held together with an outrageous number of science fiction clichés as well as a disturbing number of allusions to scientology ideals (no doubt because of Will’s allegiance to the cult).

The premise shows a human race that has had to create soldiers capable of repressing their emotions in order to fight off an alien threat. Both Will and Jaden played these soldiers. Unfortunately, this meant that ninety per cent of the film involved emotionless acting, which is just disappointing coming from Will Smith – the king of colourful performances.

The story was conceived by Will Smith and written by M. Night Shyamalan and Gary Whitta (Writer of The Book of Eli). Though Smith has been in a large number of sci-fi films, clearly nobody involved knew a thing about science: at times basic scientific principles are not only ignored but supposedly disproved. This may not annoy every viewer, but to me it was the film’s biggest flaw. You can’t have science fiction without science.

Despite all of these shortfalls the film was better than can be expected from Shyamalan these days, if only because it avoided all of his usual conventions. The film does not have a twist ending, but does have some skilfully made action scenes and structure, which creates nicely-handled tension.