Fanboy Meets World: 5 Things to Love About ‘After Earth’

Fanboy Meets World is a bi-weekly column that runs on alternate Mondays.

Listen: it’s not like “After Earth” is a good movie. But those of us with a fondness for comics, pulp adventure stories, gizmos, gadgets, gewgaws, fantasy realms and Fiend Folios ought not to turn up our noses. So it was more of a “Medium Willie” Weekend box office-wise, but for Fanboys there’s a lot to love in this unfairly maligned Scientology fable, er, I mean, tale of Father and Son facing obstacles. As a nerd, it is my job to list them.

1.) Smart Fabric

Jaden Smith isn’t running around in the woods in a onesie for no reason. He’s wearing “Smart Fabric” – unitards of the future that change color depending on the situation. At rest, you’re rockin’ something of a “burnt umber” color (if I’m remembering my Bob Ross correctly) but when trouble comes, your outfit turns black. That’s how you know sharp-toothed, stone-throwing monkeys are near. When you are freezing to the point of hypothermia and/or have a bloodstream pumped full of toxins from a mutant leech your clothes turn off-white and light blue, kinda resembling Tron Guy. Whether or not the new color will, you know, warm you up while you are cold remains unknown.

2.) 3D Holograms Everywhere

Will Smith spends most of the film behind a bank of computer screens monitoring Jaden on his quest to find the text-sending doohickey that be their rescue. In comics terms, he’s the elderly Bruce Wayne to Jaden’s Terry McGinnis. (Or the 7-Zark-7 to the G-Force Team if you want to go a little more hardcore.) Readouts with nifty fonts hover around him, making graphs and calculating survival rates as Jaden encounters setbacks. Best, though, are the peripherals that are ubiquitous in the future of “After Earth.” A gray, floppy rubber square is like a portable 3D holo-projectin’ Kindle Fire, making examining spreadsheets look just as cool as travelling faster-than-light. Speaking of which . . .

3.) Traveling

Okay, there’s an awful lot about “After Earth”’s backstory that’s a little vague (and I haven’t had a chance to dig into the paperback of collected prequel stories, even if one is written by my beloved Peter David.) Even though the Earth of “After Earth” was somehow destroyed by the recklessness of man (cue the CNN footage of storms!) humanity figured out a way to exeunt the pale blue dot and relocate to “Nova Prime.” Now, maybe there were generation ships, but the implication is that Mankind cracked the code of achieving superluminal speeds. We see it for a moment when Will Smith’s ranger Cypher Raige (yes! that name!) gives the order to “travel” to avoid getting pummeled by asteroids after a spacequake.

“Traveling” looked to me like an extrapolation of an Alcubierre Drive, a manipulation of spacetime that creates something of a warp bubble or mini wormhole. In the film, “traveling” is kinda like hitting a panic button. Without careful calculations you may wind up anywhere – but there’s no time to lose! – and that’s why our heroes end up on Earth.

4.) Cutlasses

The Rangers of “After Earth” are going to need a badass weapon, and that weapon is called the Cutlass. Cypher Raige’s version is called the C-40 Cutlass and it has 24 different settings. It’s a silver cylinder that pops out blades of varying shapes and sizes from either side, as if to say “screw you, Darth Maul, let’s see how many shapes YOU can make!” It is unclear if the Cutlass reads your mind or just knows when you need to change from a double-edged bastard sword a the humongous collection of sharp radio antennae-lookin’ weapons, but if it also has a leather punch it is the best Swiss army knife in this or any other universe.

5.) Ursas

The big meanies of “After Earth” are fear-sniffing, pincer shooting mammal-chompers that look like a cross between “Starship Troopers”’s arachnids and Peter Jackson’s version of Tolkien’s Shelob. They have a giant eye in the middle with some other little eyes around it and a little gray fur. They skitter and they pierce and they flay and they generally make a mess of things. But if you are brave (stupid?) enough not to be afraid of them they will just walk on by without paying you no never mind. It is to M. Night Shyamalan’s credit that, when the music swells as Jaden Smith just lays there to let a two-ton tarantula walk over him, you don’t crack up that much.

Fanboys, pass up that cool, refreshing glass of Haterade. “After Earth” may be dumb, but it’s our kind of dumb. I’ll be accepting your submissions for “After After Earth” fanfiction at once.

Categories: Columns

Tags: After Earth, Fanboy Meets World, Jaden smith, Jordan hoffman, M. night shyamalan, Planet Fanboy, Will smith