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

Fanboy Meets World: Why J.J. Abrams Is a Khan Artist

SPOILER WARNINGS LIKE THE GALACTIC BARRIER, YO.

One line. One word, really. Heck, four letters, though four letters stretched out quite a bit. Removing them from the final cut of “Star Trek Into Darkness” would have done a lightyears worth of goodwill for this long time Trek fan. The insistence of Abrams and Co. to stick with their policy of legacy-mining and expecting us to all squee with joy is, at heart, why I’m grousing – even though I admit that, in broad strokes, I enjoyed “Star Trek Into Darkness” a great deal. (My review at ScreenCrush, if you are interested.)

It goes like this: there are a number of really annoying little things about this movie, and you can find an exhaustive list of quibbles at the bottom of this post.

But first we need to focus on the biggest disaster, of course, is deciding to shoehorn the “known” bad guy Khan into the mix. Because everybody knows Kirk and Khan are matched enemies, even people (like Abrams) who don’t watch “Star Trek.” It’s perfect marketing. (Although Abrams, being an M Class nincompoop, decided to kneecap his own movie by keeping this secret. The moment when Benedict Cumberbatch says “My name is Khan” is the worst of both worlds. Fans get annoyed by the obvious, while non-fans – unaware that Khan didn’t have a fake identity in the original, and unfamiliar with what the name portends – say “so?” and “who?” unsure why there was this whole mystery to begin with. )

Prima facie it is a failure. Khan’s Eugenics War is supposed to take place in the 1990s, and his banishment on the Botany Bay took place prior to the destruction of the USS Kelvin in the 2009 reboot. This means that it existed before the timeline split.

Does this mean that I refuse to accept another actor playing Khan? No, I’m not a complete mental patient. But Khan Noonien Singh is supposed to be a Sikh from northern India. Ricardo Mantalban of Mexico City could at least pass. Benedict Cumberbatch of London, England does not. (Those who read the trades know that Abrams’ first choice was Benecio Del Toro, which shows a somewhat lazy attempt to get it half-right. When Del Toro passed there were rumors about Edgar Ramirez and Jordi Molla – nothing, however, about Indian actors, but come on . . . it’s not like India has one of the world’s most thriving film industries or anything.)

ALL OF THE ABOVE. ALL OF THIS I WOULD BE WILLING TO SUSPEND MY DISBELIEF AND ACCEPT. WE’RE GOOD SO FAR UNTIL. . .

The line.

The yell.

The howl.

It wasn’t enough that the focus group-based crypto-creation machine knows as Bad Robot decided to take the easy route and stick Khan in this movie. They had to go “full retard.”

When Kirk dies at the end (but just for like five minutes, because no one would ever accuse this group of having the courage of its convictions) Zachary Quinto’s nu-Spock, unable to contain his Earth emotions, starts to tremble and quake as Michael Giacchino’s score rumbles until finally. . . “KHAAAAAAAAAAAN!”

It’s an insult. And an embarrassment. It makes Jake Lloyd saying “Yippiee!” sound like Peter Finch’s monologue from “Network.”

It hurts because this movie can’t just appropriate the character Khan from the originals, it has to go and appropriate the “meme,” too.

“Khaaaaaaaan!” as rallying cry is a relatively recent creation, egged on by a “Seinfeld” episode from 1996. I didn’t see “Khaaaaaaaan!” on a T-shirt until 2008 or so (and, believe me, I would have noticed.) It began as a bit of a goof. A play on Shatner as a lovable and, let’s face it, not-always-great actor. It’s as much a play on Denny Crane and the Priceline Negotiator than it is on actual “Star Trek.”

(To be fair to Shatner, there is the theory that Captain Kirk is quite aware of his “overacting” in this scene, as it is Kirk’s intention to fake Khan into thinking that he’s truly won by stranding him on Regula, whereas the Enterprise’s captain actually has an ace up his sleeve. I strongly suggest you read my 2009 interview with “Wrath of Khan” director Nicholas Meyer for a full breakdown of all this.)

You can practically see Abrams in story meetings, sixteen cellphones held by assistants up to his head as he closes deals on television shows, saying “yeah, yeah, we gotta have the line!” with no actual understanding about what it means – how, to fans of “Star Trek,” this little bit of ridiculousness is our ridiculousness, and to do a clip and paste of it into the emotional death-by-radiation scene is an atrocity.

There’s another problem. Quinto doesn’t nail it. Quinto is a decent enough actor, about as good of a Nimoy proxy as we’re likely to get. But there’s a reason he’s segued his “Star Trek” fame into producing whereas nearly everyone else in the crew has taken leading roles in mainstream pictures.

The Bad Robot team probably expected hoots and hollers from fans when Quinto delivered the line. My gut tells me that test audiences never gave it – which is why there isn’t room for a beat afterwards (the action cuts mid-scream to the Vengeance smashing into the Enterprise while both ships are in Earth’s stratosphere.)

The lack of reaction (and I’ve seen the film with audiences twice) is, I’m guessing, a mix of Quinto’s middling delivery and the fact that, in the context of this film, it doesn’t make a lick of sense. Khan isn’t really the one responsible for Kirk’s death. Kirk had to go fix the reactor core because of cumulative damage from throughout the film – damage that started with Admiral Marcus’ sabotage.

Quinto could just as well be shouting “MAAAAAAAARCUS!!!!” or at least “MAAAAAAARCUS AND KHAAAAAAAAAAN WORKING IN CONJUUUUUUUUUUUNCTION!” But he doesn’t, because it’s important to get the meme in there, because the people in charge of this movie really and truly don’t get it.

There’s something they teach you in any creative program: kill your babies. Sometimes you have to cut out great stuff for the sake of the larger piece. You’d think “Star Trek Into Darkness,” a film that cut the COLON out of the title, would know how to make a cut. But this line, this word, these four letters remain in the finished film. If it were gone I may would have been able to ignore all the other problems in the film – or at least accept them a little easier. I still like “Star Trek Into Darkness” a great deal, because Abrams knows where to put the camera and, with the exception of this beat, all the performances are great. But this is because I have the ability to root out the good parts in a movie, even when I’m being khanned.

And now, bring out the quibbles!

** World-building problems like: why would a Federation hospital, even in England, have the monarchial name “Royal” associated with it?

** Story beats like Nero’s 25-year wait from 2009's “Star Trek” that were probably explained in earlier versions of the script, but were removed so this movie could zoom at Warp Factor 6, like: If Section 31 was just blown to bits, how did “John Harrison” find the transwarp beaming device after the bombing? And if he didn’t, then what was in that black bag that Kirk was focusing on? And how did Kirk just contact Scotty on his communicator without patching through to Uhura’s communications array? And how did they get from Kronos to Earth in only, like, 45 seconds of warp?

** Inexplicable gales in logic, like: why would a new super torpedo, even if it runs on some new, undetectable fuel source, have ROOM to let you just, you know, crack it open and stick a giant 20th Century cryotube inside of it? How is this efficient design?!??!?

** Moments of great disrespect to the audience, like: Why wouldn’t Carol Marcus just, like, wait 30 seconds to get undressed, or step in another room? (Answer: super bowl ads demand a panty shot, but we Trekkers should demand more!)

** Moments of great disrespect to the legacy of “Star Trek,” like: Carol Marcus implying that Kirk the Jerk pulled a “love ‘em and leave ‘em” on Christine Chapel. Pardon me? Christine Chapel? You mean . . .Gene Roddenberry’s wife? If this isn’t Abrams and his gang “marking their territory” on Roddenberry’s version of “Star Trek” in the most disgusting, phallocentric way, then I don’t know what is! (Eh, I’ll allow that Abrams, who time and again in interviews has proven he doesn’t know, and doesn’t care, about “Star Trek” history didn’t mean it this way. But someone should have spot-checked this and changed the pointless fan-wank namedrop to somebody else.)

Categories: Columns

Tags: Fan Rant, Fanboy Meets World, J.j. abrams, Jordan hoffman, Khan, Star trek, Star Trek Into Darkness

Your Daily Short: ‘Bambi Meets Godzilla’

Welcome to Your Daily Short, a new feature on Film.com that will highlight and stream a short film at high noon. Every weekday. Every week.

TODAY’S SHORT: “Bambi Meets Godzilla” (Marv Newland) 1969

RUNNING TIME:  1:30

WHY YOU SHOULD WATCH IT: Um, did you read the title? Legend has it that filmmaker Marv Newland was planning on shooting a live-action film, but – upon losing the magic hour light for a key shot – frustratedly retreated to his bedroom, where he quickly devised this masterpiece of the short form. A classic tragedy that bridges the gap between Menander and Mickey Mouse, “Bambi Meets Godzilla” is a sobering reminder that every moment is a gift. Right?

Watch the previous Daily Short: “Brazzaville Teen-Ager”

Do you have a favorite short film that you would like us to feature as Your Daily Short? Whether it’s something you love, something you made, or both, send it along to Filmdotcomshorts@Gmail.com and you might see it on the site!

Categories: Columns

Tags: Bambi, Bambi Meets Godzilla, Godzilla, Short Film, Your Daily Short