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

Review: ‘After Earth’

We open with a voice-over, followed immediately by flashbacks. Incredibly, with these bold strokes, “After Earth” announces it will be terrible right from the outset, and woe be upon the person who holds out hope that it will get better after the initial wobbly start. It will not get better, it will only get worse, until you’re actively cheering for a teenage kid to get eaten by a tiger (and wanting the tiger to savor every bite). I didn’t plan to feel this way, and no one could have predicted the best possible outcome for the film would be the brutal murder of a character one of the Smithlettes was portraying, but you did this to me, “After Earth”. You made me root against the good guy, mostly because you made him so incompetent, so repugnant, so unlikable, that you rendered his journey and story arc meaningless. For when is a hero not a hero? When he acts worse than your average guy off the street. “After Earth” stupefies us with nonsense, such little thought and logic went into this idea that it can’t even be considered a rough draft, this is a movie almost daring an audience to emotionally detach throughout. For shame!

To explain the threadbare plot shouldn’t take particularly long, even though the 100-minute running time of “After Earth” lasts around six years. Will Smith, as the delightfully named Cypher Raige, is a general in a futuristic army. He’s human, a descendant of Earthlings forced to flee the planet because “we destroyed it,” though the destruction seems to have been a mix of nuclear bombs, pollution, and natural disasters. 1,000 years later, everyone lives on a planet called Nova Prime, where things are pretty peachy except for the occasional Ursa monster, a predator that is utterly blind, able to hunt based solely upon the scent humans make when they’re afraid. Cypher is FEARLESS, and thus doesn’t secrete the “fear” pheromone, so he’s able to waltz up to these Ursas and wallop them with impunity. He definitely gives them the ol’ “what for,” I tell you. Look here, Ursa, there’s a new sheriff in town, and this one can’t be smelt.

Also check out: The Films of M. Night Shyamalan, Ranked from Best to Worst

Now, set aside your thinking cap for just a moment, the one that says, “well couldn’t they wear airtight suits, or make a perfume, or use missiles, or mix fear smells with poisonous gas, or have robots punch all the Ursas, or use drones that existed a full millennium earlier to hunt the Ursa down, all while they snacked in front of a futuristic monitor?” No! Put all of these thoughts right out of your head! “After Earth” has no time for your foolishness, because it’s too busy getting Cypher and his son, Kitai (Jaden Smith, clearly typecast as Will’s son) together for an adventure. Kitai wants to be a Ranger too, just like his dad, but he doesn’t have the “no fear” part down yet, which would make him Ursa lunch, or dinner, depending on the time of day.

Cypher and Kitai (coincidentally the name of my new CBS pilot) are having trouble connecting, because dad is always out stomping around, secreting nothing but machismo and Old Spice. To alleviate the growing distance between them, Cypher brings Kitai along on a training mission, that, you guessed it, goes horribly wrong. They are then marooned on Earth, and Cypher is hurt, leaving Kitai to perform a dangerous life-saving mission by his lonesome. He’s got his dad to virtually lead him, using futuristic “Go-Pro” technology every step of the way, but he’s going to have to prove he’s got the right stuff, or else they are both, gulp, dead meat.

That’s not a terrible premise. Or rather, it’s not a wholly terrible premise, there are good parts in there, like the father-son bonding, future Rangers, and men who have been named Cypher without any subtext whatsoever. Sadly, as soon as the action switches to Earth, around 20 minutes in, it’s all doom from there on out. Little Kitai fights poisonous slugs, a giant bird, tigers, simians, and ultimately, ugh, himself. Along the way he’ll have to prove he’s every bit the man that dad is, even if dad happens to come off as a complete jerky jerk who raised a son that wouldn’t be fit to deliver newspapers on a rainy day. Indeed, Kitai is the kid you’d put in charge if you were working for Team Ursa, he has so many ways to fail that the scouts would label him a “five-fool player” and draft him the first round of the “nincompoop draft”.

Yes, Kitai is instantly unlikable, when he’s not listening to his parents, he’s proving he knows nothing about the world, and when he is tuning into what his father is saying, it’s usually just so he can come back with a genius rejoinder such as, “I can do it myself, Dad! I don’t need your help!”

So, unlikable hero, a distant and disposable father-son bond, but surely the futuristic aspect of “After Earth” gets in there and salvages this thing, right? Well, no. Not at all. If anything it makes it so much worse, because when the action parts are playing out, riddled with logic problems, you find yourself pining for the quiet stupidity of an abusive dad and his ninny son. For instance, Kitai wears a fancy suit that alerts him to danger by turning black, or to toxins by turning white. Now, whatever you do, don’t ask, “well, does it do something else besides turn color, like say put up a force field, or make him faster, or give him medicine, or maybe turn on an emergency jetpack, or provide a distraction to the predator, or camouflage him somewhat?” No! Do not ask these things, for the suit has just turned white, ooooh, how impressive. Why, they’ve stumbled onto the same lofty technology that the Coors guys use, to tell me when my beer is cold!

Here’s another example – the use of spears. Little Kitai Raige (Best band name ever) is sent out to fight thousands of predators with a mutable spear. Oh, it changes shapes, it can become a scythe, a sword, whatever sort of weapon you like, except for the one that would actually help, something along the lines of a machine gun. Can you imagine fighting off a pack of tiger-wolves with a freaking spear?! Or outrunning simians without anything resembling advanced technology? “After Earth” takes place in a time where we were able to figure out light speed and interstellar travel, but any weapon above “Swiss Army Knife” seems to outpace our ambition. That’s “After Earth” for you, where nothing makes any sense at all, not the weaponry, the relationships, the antagonists, or the mission itself. It’s astoundingly awful.

Thankfully, once you’ve gotten past the terrible logic and meaningless relationships, “After Earth” assaults you with a complete lack of tension. They are trying to kill this Kitai fellow off every ten minutes, only what are the chances of them doing just that? Especially 25 minutes in, when all the “action” commences? Everything in “After Earth” is arbitrary. Kitai must get to a transmitter because he needs to transmit. Cypher must not leave the ship himself because he’s hurt, no one else an be around because they’ve only got the one camera crew and so on, and so forth. He has exactly enough oxygen to finish the mission! Safety, each evening, is the exact distance he could plausibly reach! Cypher can man the computer interface 24/7 because he never needs bathroom breaks or food! And so on, and so forth, into the cold receding distance of irrelevance.

The level to which “After Earth” is a catastrophe is amazing, but what’s even more impressive is the lengths everyone must have had to gone to for such an epic level of failure. Everyone involved, from director M. Night Shyamalan all the way down to Jaden Smith is culpable, and truly capable of so much better. “After Earth” shouldn’t be seen on this planet, and if we ever discover new ones, habitable ones, we should take steps to make sure it’s never shown there either, just in case.

SCORE: 1.2 / 10

Laremy wrote the book on film criticism and thinks Shamalan’s best movie is actually “Unbreakable”.

Categories: Reviews

Tags: After Earth, Jaden smith, Laremy legel, M. night shyamalan, Review, Will smith

Trailer: M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘After Earth’

From our pals at NextMovie:

Every year, untold thousands of American fathers and sons embark on a ritual bonding trip that often involves camping in the wilderness, hiking, fishing and other manly rites of passage. But you know what would make that stuff even cooler? If they were being attacked by hordes of mutated animals.

At least, that’s the takeaway from the new trailer for Will and Jaden Smith’s “After Earth.”

Courtesy of Apple Trailers, the latest look at this summer’s M. Night Shyamalan sci-fi epic features a closer look at the father-son bonding element of “After Earth.” Turns out that the story starts with the duo heading off into space for a little face time to repair their unhappy relationship. And then, of course, it ends with them trying to repair a crashed spaceship on the surface of a deadly future Earth filled with bizarre monsters.

All of which makes “After Earth,” which arrives on June 7, the perfect movie for Father’s Day this year. So check out the new trailer and then give your own dad a hug.

Because chances are, that guy would literally fight a horde of irradiated baboons for you, just like Will Smith.

Categories: No Categories

Tags: After Earth, Jaden smith, M. night shyamalan, Trailer, Will smith

Review: Another Earth – Flawed but Unforgettable

Imagine if you will … another Earth, with another you … did that you make the same mistakes? Is she, or he, more successful or happier?

These are the questions Sundance award-winning film Another Earth poses as it beckons you into a modern Twilight Zone. If, however, you can’t stomach sci-fi that’s based on shaky science, it may not be a screen destination you want to visit. If instead, you’re willing to suspend disbelief and a few planetary laws and logical assumptions then it’s a trip worth taking — and one that will linger long after it’s over.

Though director/writer Mike Cahill’s film revolves around a fantastic premise — that another mirror Earth has suddenly manifested itself and hasn’t, miraculously, proved catastrophic for either planet — it’s kept in motion by the forces of taut, intimate human drama, at the heart of which is Rhoda (the movie’s co-writer, Brit Marling). The future looks bright for the beautiful, brainy MIT-bound 17-year-old, until her post-party drunk driving causes a tragic car accident that kills a wife and child and leaves the husband/father, John (William Mapother, Lost‘s Ethan Rom), in a coma. Four months later, Rhoda, her spirit still hung in shame, is released from jail. Preferring to work with her hands and avoid conversation, she takes a job as a high school janitor. (But she doesn’t secretly solve any unsolvable equations and then get a job at a government think tank, she just mops floors with an old Indian man that looks, and acts, as if he’s occasionally possessed or suffers from schizophrenic fits.)

Things get tricky when Rhoda learns John has recovered; she knocks on his door so she can deliver the heartfelt apology she’s rehearsed. Not surprisingly, she chickens out and instead tells him she’s offering a free trial cleaning service — an offer he can’t refuse considering the dirty, disheveled, liquor-bottle-littered state of his home. As an unlikely romance blossoms between the two, the truth of who Rhoda is looms above it like a storm cloud. In fact, it looms above the entire film and its landscape. Minus a few blissful sun-meets-sea vistas of Earth’s alluringly ghostly twin, it weeps with grief, despair, and regret — from its gray skies to its somber symphony soundtrack.

But the parallel Earth (and plot) that haunts the horizon also offers a sliver of hope, especially when United Space Ventures announces it will send the winner of their essay contest on one of the first flights to the duplicate planet. Brit’s arresting entry begins “as a felon, I’m an unlikely candidate for most things…,” and proceeds to point out that most explorers have been convicts or madmen.

Meanwhile, to add to Another Earth‘s surreal atmosphere, Rhoda’s story unfolds amidst the background buzz of T.V. and radio sound bites that echo the baffled world’s attempt to make sense of Earth 2, like a subconscious narrative in a dream. The film is also full of arresting ethereal scenes, such as Rhoda lying hopeless and naked in the snow, or John’s unearthly saw serenade.

As forewarned, Another Earth has its logic flaws, and a moodiness that at times borders on melodrama. Yet it’s still the stuff of great science fiction — intriguing, gripping, and well-acted with the requisite plot twist — and ultimately, it’s unforgettable.

Grade: B+

FILM THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (2008)

Tanggal Rilis : 12 December 2008 (Indonesia)
Jenis Film : Drama | Sci-Fi | Thriller
Diperankan Oleh : Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Connelly and Kathy Bates

Ringkasan Cerita FILM THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (2008) :

Klaatu (Keanu Reeves) adalah makhluk luar angkasa yang mendarat di Washington DC bersama Gort, sebuah robot canggih, dengan sebuah pesawat ruang angkasa. Pada saat baru keluar dari dalam pesawat, Klaatu ditembak oleh tentara yang merasa terkejut dengan kemunculan pesawat aneh ini.

Untungnya Gort kemudian datang dan melelehkan senjata para tentara yang ada di sana tanpa melukai seorang pun yang ada di lokasi tersebut. Ternyata, Gort memang tak pernah bermaksud melukai siapa pun. Gort hanya bermaksud melindungi Klaatu.

Klaatu kemudian dibawa oleh para tentara ke rumah sakit untuk mendapatkan perawatan. Saat berada di rumah sakit, Klaatu kemudian memutuskan untuk melarikan diri agar dapat membaur dengan penduduk planet Bumi ini.

Klaatu kemudian bertemu dengan Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly) yang kemudian mengajak Klaatu untuk berkeliling kota. Helen awalnya tak menyangka bahwa Klaatu adalah makhluk dari planet lain. Namun seiring kedekatan mereka, Helen mulai curiga dan meminta penjelasan pada Klaatu.

Klaatu akhirnya membuka rahasia dan menyampaikan maksud kedatangannya ke Bumi. Klaatu dan Gort adalah makhluk luar angkasa yang bertugas memutuskan apakah sebuah planet harus dihancurkan atau dibiarkan tetap ada.

(Sumber : kapanlagi)

[IMDb rating : 5.5/10]
[Awards : 2 wins & 5 nominations]
[Production Co : Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 3 Arts Entertainment]
[IMDb link : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0970416]

[Quality : DVDRip]
[File Size : 700 MB]
[Format : Avi]

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Bagi Pengunjung Baru klik di sini Cara Menggabungkan File Ekstensi .001 dan .002

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