After Earth

World War Z was bad, and so was After Earth, but After Earth was bad in an enjoyable way. It’s a subtle but crucial difference that largely revolves around how good it was trying to be. World War Z seems to fancy itself some great epic with an incredibly serious tone, gritty characters and heart-wrenching scenarios yet falls flat. After Earth is a cheesy sci-fi and doesn’t try to be any more than that. It’s less pretentious, much sillier and much smaller-scale – and as a result, though both are bad films, this one is far more likeable and honestly the critical consensus that this is by far the worse film strikes me as nonsense.

Though probably having Smith’s original idea of this being set in a real-world remote wilderness and the son having to go out for help across a mountain or some such could have been a much more engaging, challenging and intelligent film and done much better, I did enjoy the cheesy sci-fi setting and the silly form-fitting colour-changing sci-fi suits that I assume not only looked but acted much like the Stillsuits in Dune, since the only bodily function Kitai seemed to need to think about was breathing. Ambitious but vulnerable and headstrong young Kitai must go to find a distress beacon when the spaceship carrying him and his extremely capable but badly injured father crashes and is torn into two parts. He is adorably hapless at first and Jaden Smith’s skinny body, ability to look very scared and features that definitely look like a mini version of his father all helped him do this part well and be both likeable and inspire a protective instinct, which is all the film really needed.

Of course, it’s cheesy – especially at the end, with the daft scenes of Jaden learning to be a badass and an inspirational salute. But it revels in cheese. It’s like a cartoon adaptation (a far better one than Shyamalan’s previous attempt with Avatar) or a remake of an old sci-fi with a couple of bloody scenes thrown in to pretend to be grown-up. It’s fun.

That’s what I think the critics missed here. All that makes me slightly sad is that the other film that didn’t happen, the gritty one about father and son stranded in the modern day, could have been a good successor to The Pursuit of Happyness.  

World War Z

Though at one point on course to be a megaflop, it looks like World War Z may now be considered successful enough for sequels. Like Avatar, this is another triumph of style over substance. It has some very impressive scenes of bodies piling up and planes and helicopters crashing down and huge crowd scenes, but plot, characters and pace? Truly dire.

The sad fact is that after playing The Last of Us, this comes as a pale imitation. Sure, games haven’t reached a true level of realism yet, but the zombies are a hell of a lot more creepy and the story is far more imaginative.

Here, Brad Pitt’s character, who we’re expected to believe is respected at the very highest level of government and a super-kick-ass operative, has become a family man with two incredibly annoying kids whose uselessness is meant to give him a sensitive side but just grates like nails on blackboard. Coerced into going into the field, he fucks things up for everyone he meets (an army base is massacred because his phone goes off; he doesn’t tell what survivors there may be on a plane that he’s gonna blow up its wall so they all die along with the pilots who would otherwise have likely made it; and okay, in Israel he just happens to be there right as chaos really sets in. He also has a mutant healing factor after getting a metal spike through the abdomen, and magical powers of finding a building from a plane crash site with no way of knowing how to get there.

Overlong to the point of pomposity, hugely unoriginal and with a solution that should have been observed by huge numbers of the population and those leading scientists who were shown as so inept, not just tough guy Pitt. 

Man of Steel

The latest Superman reboot, unlike 2006’s glossy Superman Returns, got in line with the last decade’s fashion for making superhero films darker and grittier. And I must say, I ended up liking it considerably more than I expected to.

The trailer was misleading, making it look like the film would largely be Smallville the Motion Picture, which I don’t think I would have enjoyed much, so I was quite pleased that what I got was largely a high-octane sci-fi melodrama. In the grand scheme of comic book adaptations, it’s in the lower half and is in large part just another Thor – with an uncannily similar overall story – but it was still spectacular, enjoyable and less frustrating than most Superman stories.

This Supes is not the all-American hero who quick-changes in the phone booths, wears his underpants outside his trousers and turns back time by flying around the Earth really fast. He’s a lot more Wolverine here, drifting on his own in scruffy stolen clothes and a wild beard, silently saving lives and disappearing before anyone asks too many questions. After a great cheesy prologue with Russell Crowe as Jor-El whuppin’ some ass before sending baby Kal off to Earth shortly before Krypton goes the way of Thundera, we largely follow this wildman, with some flashbacks to his father Kevin Costner impressing on the young Clarke Kent that keeping his powers secret until the time is right is important. When a scouting ship from Krypton is found, Clarke makes his way there and inadvertently starts up a beacon. Of course, this summons General Zod to Earth with his cronies, they promptly out Kal-El as one of them, and some good ole super-scraps can start up.

This was really what Man of Steel had that other versions of the same story don’t. Terrence Stamp is pretty awesome, but Superman II just didn’t have the technology we have for ridiculous fights where single punches send steel bodies ripping through buildings or into exploding trains. Apart from when Zod scales a building there’s a real weight and momentum to these fights that felt missing from most recent superhero films aside from the silly but refreshing Hancock and the latest Iron Man, and the scale of Snyder’s action sequences has no regard for buildings, military hardware or human lives (unless of course there’s a character shield in place, as with Laurence Fishburne’s doing-much-with-little newspaper boss (Perry White?).

The reason I was pleasantly surprised was that the trouble with Superman is that he’s so overpowered that any threat other than an equal just doesn’t work. Constant use of Kryptonite gets tiresome – and it’s thankfully absent here – and Lex Luthor being so easily squashable unless he has some absurd robot suit on makes him so unsatisfying as a nemesis (he’s here only in an oblique ‘Lexcorp’ nod). But this is a straight-ahead action film about a friendly superpowered alien who gets into a huge fight with other aliens with equal powers – a familiar but very different sort of film – and that works very well without the need for silly alien rocks or unlikely indistinguishable-from-magic tech.

There were some very distracting quibbles – the worst-placed Wilhelm scream ever and prison capsules for Zod and co that looked uncomfortably like squat dildoes (and I just Googled that to make sure I wasn’t alone – which I wasn’t’!) – but overall the lack of things I dislike about Superman in general, the likeable if cliché-gritty new version of Clarke in newly-awesome costume, the absurd but highly enjoyable action and for once heavy things really felt like heavy things. Only a few shades above mediocre, but that made it a pleasant surprise. 

The Purge

This guileless, sensationalist, hypocritical and overall very tedious film took great pride in raising interesting moral questions and then doing absolutely nothing to answer them. About the only thing that impressed me was realising how much work they clearly do to make Lena Headey look so glamorous and stiff in Game of Thrones when here she looks so nice-normal-mother-of-two.

Ripping off that old ‘Red Hour’ episode of Star Trek (though at least giving a decent explanation), the premise is in the near future, the financial crisis got so bad that American society broke down, and the only way that the ‘new Founding Fathers’ could bring back stability and order was to introduce a 12-hour annual ‘purge’, in which all crimes are made legal.

It’s quite clear that some studio exec beefed up the tagline with ‘all crimes’, though, as it is obviously only assault and murder that are legalised. This is hinted at when a recorded voice states only weapons of a certain class and under are permitted, and after all you don’t see mass fraud, no kids are abused, no drugs are taken, nobody marries multiple spouses and no movie collections are downloaded – at least onscreen. For twelve hours, basically gangs are allowed to roam the streets with guns and knives and attack whoever they find, or one another.

The moral dilemma that the script pays most attention to is the social divide this necessarily causes – the rich buy security systems for their homes and stock up on guns, while the poor become the targets of hunts as those inclined to murder frame it as improving society – culling those who do not contribute so that society as a whole is left with those who contribute. This goes a little way to explaining why mostly people go out ‘hunting’ with just a few weapons and possibly scary masks, rather than body armour or weaponized vehicles, and nobody has minigun barracks added to their homes, which would have been very sensible for our protagonists here – rather than attacking one another, mostly the people in this dystopia apparently prey on the weak.

This, along with two other events, forms the impetus for the action here. Pure-hearted little twelve-year-old boy sees a homeless black guy getting chased and pleading for help, so lets him into the central family’s armoured home, leading a mob of privileged thrill-seekers to lay siege to them unless the uncooperative homeless guy is given up to them. Of course, enjoying their legal killing and being creepy and rich makes them morally okay to kill, closely following the Hollywood rules, and little kiddy doesn’t have to deal with the fact that his act of mercy leaves many, many people dead including one very close to him, because that would be a little too complex an issue for this film.

The other two things that spark the action are the teenaged daughter character’s boyfriend deciding the best way for the family to accept him is to kill his girlfriend’s father, which of course goes wrong and ends up a plot that goes absolutely nowhere and feels so extraneous it felt like it had to come back in some form later – but doesn’t. And then the ridiculously obviously signposted intervention of the neighbours, whose timing is nonsensical but who at least provide an amusingly absurd closing scene.

The long and short of it is that the central idea is too absurd to really work, the execution is so limited as to feel like a total waste, and the moral questions raised only get vaguely touched at – barely even scratched. The horribly obvious scriptwriting, the over-the-top bad-guy acting, the cheap attempts at horror-style jumps and the uninteresting characters make this feel like a bad episode of a television series, and not even close to the quality a feature film should have.  

The Imposter

Forgot one more film from the plane: The Imposter, a rather bizarre documentary about a 23-year-old heavily-accented not-even-very-youthful-looking Frenchman who manages to pass himself off as a 16-year-old American who disappeared at 13 and was small, blonde and pretty. The family take him in and he even makes national news with his story, getting increasingly outlandish in his lies – he was kidnapped by a child prostitution ring in the upper echelons of the military who broke his bones and went so far as to change his eye colour for no apparent reason. Eventually it all comes out and he’s arrested, but then comes the question of just why the family were so quick to believe such a different-looking man is their lost son – grief and desperation and an overestimation of just how far abuse can go to completely changing a person, or an ulterior motive? The latter is put forward but seems unlikely to me, especially if they were willing to let the ‘boy’ go on television and appear in the papers. Amazing he didn’t flat-out refuse that part, too. A case of reality being stranger than fiction…