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.