So this summer, you’ll have no shortage of Earth-as-a-barren-wasteland-and-metaphor-for-our-excess movies. Tom Cruise rides motorbikes alone next month in “Oblivion,” and not too long after, M. Night Shyamalan delivers “After Earth,” which presents the planet as having evolved to kill humans. It turns our there is something scarier than the wind in “The Happening“….
Okay, okay, snark aside, this actually doesn’t look too awful — or at least not “The Last Airbender” awful. On the plus side, this looks appropriately epic and huge, and most importantly, it stands on its own from its closest comparison point, “Oblivion.” And the action stuff doesn’t look as corny as we though it would. On the downside? What the fuck are those accents? And we’re not really keen on watching a whole movie of Furrowed Brow Will Smith trying to reconcile his relationship with his son. For a movie set far in the future, that’s a pretty tired concept.
Anyway, we’ll leave it to you to let us know what you think. Trailer below — “After Earth” crash lands on June 7th.
Fell asleep halfway through the trailer.
No thanks.
The over earnestness, the grandiosity, the ultra cheesy dialogue and the inexplicably false acting… This is "The Last Airbender" all over again. I thought it was a good idea for Shyamalan to step away from screenwriting, but he is now listed as one of the screenwriters on this movie… and it shows.
It should be called After Earf.
Am I the only one who thinks that Will Smith gets killed in the landing and later it turns out that his son has been talking to the ship's AI or imagining the whole thing up?
Like Hal Hartley, M. Night Shyamalan's films have a stylized style of dialogue. Watch all of his movies, and you'll notice characters speaking in hushed tones, filled with pauses, and no contractions. The restrained acting from both Smiths seems pretty consistent with that.
I'm looking forward to this because it puts front and center a theme of Shyamalan's that he's yet to make the primary focus of in a film–children seeking validation from their elders. Supposedly the two primary influences on this flick are Alien and Pather Panchali–meaning I'm sold.
Is he doing a Morgan Freeman impersonation? Are they BOTH doing a Morgan Freeman impersonation?
This looks beyond awful, like everything M. Night has done. I'll be watching Oblivion instead. And what the hell kind of accents are they speaking in?