The Bottom Line
The disappointing sci-fi survival tale does little with its substantial resources.Opens
Friday, May 31 (Sony Pictures)Cast
Jaden Smith, Will Smith, Sophie Okonedo, Zoe Isabella KravitzWill and Jaden Smith play a father and son marooned on a long-uninhabited Earth.
Humanity's home planet hardly merits the name-check in After Earth, M. Night Shyamalan's
sci-fi survival tale whose shipwreck action could (with the exception
of a scene where our hero scrawls a crude map over Lascaux-like cave
paintings) take place on any old life-supporting globe in the cosmos.
The disappointingly generic film, which strands a father and son (Will and Jaden Smith)
on Earth a thousand years after a planet-wide evacuation, will leave
genre audiences pining for the more Terra-centric conceits of Oblivion,
not to mention countless other future-set films that find novelty in
making familiar surroundings threatening. Will Smith's presence, not
just as costar but as originator of the story, seems likely to carry box
office receipts beyond the benchmark of Shyamalan's previous picture,
the wretched The Last Airbender, but those hoping for a franchise should navigate elsewhere.
No comments:
Post a Comment