My DVD movie watch on 11 June 2021 was a sci fi film set in the very distant future that did fairly well at the box office but apparently was absolutely hated by the critics – so obviously I loved it! Its title? After Earth.
Conceived and co-produced by American blockbuster actor Will Smith, directed and also co-produced by M. Night Shyamalan, and released by Sony Pictures in 2013, After Earth takes place in the year 3071, and stars Smith alongside his real-life son Jaden, Moreover, they play father and son roles in the movie too. Namely, Cypher Raige, leader of a peace-keeping organization in Space known as the Ranger Corps, and his Ranger-in-training teenage son Kitai.
They are the only human survivors when, following bombardment by an asteroid shower, their spacecraft crash-lands on Earth, from which humanity evacuated centuries ago to another planet (Nova Prime) far away after having destroyed Earth's global ecosystem – or so they thought. It turns out that in the absence of bad old Homo sapiens, good old Mother Nature has restored ecological equilibrium and now Earth is once again a thriving, verdant planet populated with all manner of species – all of which, however, are seriously hostile to humans.
In addition, a monstrous blind but fear-sensing alien creature known as an ursa, held captive on the spacecraft, has survived the crash too but has escaped. Cypher Raige is trapped inside the craft with two broken legs among various other injuries, and is becoming ever weaker, but the craft's severed tail piece containing the only beacon that can alert a rescue team is over 100 km away. So Kitai, who is shocked but physically uninjured, has to face a perilous journey through the great unknown of Earth's wilderness in order to reach the tail piece and fire off the beacon.
En route, Kitai is confronted by all manner of dangerous beasts, including a troop of bloodthirsty baboons, a venom-injecting water parasite, a huge teratorn-like bird of prey, a pack of re-evolved sabre-toothed big cats, a flying snake, and, inevitably, the escaped ursa. The only way of surviving an ursa encounter is to ghost – i.e. adopt a state of mind entirely free of fear, so that the ursa cannot sense you while you stalk and kill it. But can the inexperienced, untrained Kitai achieve this extraordinary feat of mental control?
Due to After Earth's relatively modest box-office performance, the planned franchise that was to have been launched on the back of it never took off, which is sad, as I feel that it offered much promise. Also, some quite lengthy footage showing the back-story of humanity's desecration and desertion of Earth followed by the resettlement of our species far away on Nova Prime was deleted before this movie's final version was released, which again I personally feel is a great shame.
Certainly, for me, After Earth is a very entertaining, absorbing film, full of tension and anticipation, with the two Smiths portraying their respective roles effectively enough, especially lead actor Jaden in his, and the CGI monsters are superb. True, I would have liked to have seen more of the ursa – it is evident that a great deal of thought went into its creation by the CGI animators – but its relatively brief climactic battle with Kitai is well worth the wait.
If you’d like to watch a preview of After Earth, click here to access an official trailer for it on YouTube; and click here if you can't wait to watch the entire movie in order to view Kitai's fearless battle with the ursa while doing his utmost to perpetuate his all-encompassing ghosting state of mind.
To view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.
The Earth looks restored to pristine beauty in just a few centuries. This would have been a great franchise in that exploring the planet and perhaps repopulating it.
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