I found it very difficult to get emotionally invested in the characters either or the father-son relationship(a bad thing considering that this is the driving force really of the film). The already admittedly by-the-numbers story here was incredibly plodding and confused, very little made sense and there was nothing gripping. Since though, his storytelling has consisted of some good ideas that are executed badly, all too clear here. Shyamalan showed with Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and the first half of Signs that he did have potential to tell a good story. Instead of making me get engrossed in the characters, their situation and feelings, I found that the dialogue and delivery was just distracting. The dialogue was so awkward-sounding and clichéd, often I found myself not being able to take what I was hearing seriously. And that was the case with After Earth, I saw little if any heart or character in the directing. With Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, up until after The Village Shyamalan showed potential but after that point saw him getting lazy. The photography and editing had moments where they were decent but others where they were amateurish, too many times steering towards the latter, the jump cut shots were just annoying and took away from any shocks, tension or suspense. The visuals didn't do anything for me either, the sets were surprisingly drab and unimaginative and the special effects were very repetitively used. It does have some beautiful sounds, it's just sparingly used and while well-composed and fitting it is also one of those scores that I came out of the cinema not remembering most of. I wouldn't say that James Newton Howard's score is bad actually here. It is not the worst film I've seen or one of the worst and but it is the worst film that I've seen so far this year. That of which in my mind makes After Earth worse.
The Happening and The Last Airbender suffered mainly from having such potential but falling hard big time, Happening did have some unintentional comic value(mainly because Mark Walhberg's acting was so laughably bad) and Airbender had great visuals and score.Īfter Earth didn't have as much potential as those two but didn't have any of the things that raised the other two up a slight notch. Lady in the Water was well-made generally and I liked Bryce Dallas Howard in it as well as the score but the rest was a muddled mess. Signs was pretty good until it went off the boil in the second half, which really brought things down to a significant degree. Of the movies that get a lot of hate The Village was the least bad, not great but pretty decent(while Shyamalan didn't direct but produced and wrote Devil, that also applies here). The Sixth Sense was a masterpiece and Unbreakable was great.
It is not as if I immediately hate on M Night Shyamalan. Reviewed by TheLittleSongbird 1 / 10 A low point in both M Night Shyamalan and Will Smith's careers, with one of the worst child performances I've seen for any film His whole life, Kitai has wanted nothing more than to be a soldier like his father. As his father lies dying in the cockpit, Kitai must trek across the hostile terrain to recover their rescue beacon.
When an asteroid storm damages Cypher and Kitai's craft, they crash-land on a now unfamiliar and dangerous Earth. Legendary General Cypher Raige returns from an extended tour of duty to his estranged family, ready to be a father to his 13-year-old son, Kitai. One thousand years after cataclysmic events forced humanity's escape from Earth, Nova Prime has become mankind's new home.