Reviews: After Earth

Reviews are a new feature I'm going to try to do very regularly on this blog on pretty much anything I think require writing about. I was going to do reviews in a sort of "end of the month" feature but (for this month anyway), I didn't have enough to warrant a month-long post but too much for a single blog post. Complicated I know but it makes sense in my head to do them individually from now on.

Like I said before, I'm going to be writing about pretty much anything, but this is especially including samples or things that I've been sent for free. This is probably going to be quite often as I'm obsessing over vouchers and freebies recently. Also it's probably worth mentioning that the time scale on a couple of the reviews might not be accurate as sometimes they would have been written a while before being uploaded. This one, for example, I wrote last week.

So I've babbled on for long enough, without further ado, here is my first review!

I saw After Earth this week with Jaden and Will Smith and was going to write a review on it. That was, until I saw other people’s reviews on it.

My first thought after seeing these other reviews was that I could never be a film critic as I simply didn’t see what these other people saw. I didn’t find the film slow paced or boring or anything of that nature so clearly I wasn’t paying attention properly. But then it occurred to me; I wasn’t looking for or at the same thing that these other reviewers were.

After Earth is expected to be this big action packed survival adventure and understandably so from the trailers. However what I found from watching the movie is that it’s a really poignant coming-of-age drama where a father and son desperately need to reconnect.

As a survival epic, I understand where it failed. It was a bit boring and a lot more about the emotional journey rather than a young soldier fighting for his and his father’s life on a foreign planet. There were no prolonged dramas and pretty much ever problem the boy faced on his journey was overcome by the next scene. Yet his own personal dramas of wanting acceptance from his strict and sometimes emotionless father were very much present throughout and, I thought, portrayed beautifully.

The chemistry between Jaden and Will is amazing, and you would expect that from a father and son anyway, but I think that it’s really amazing how their relationship is so intricately shown even when they’re not in the same place together and all they share is a video link (which is for quite a lot of the film). You find yourself begging Will’s character to reach out for his son, to tell him that he loves him, yet understanding his struggle as a fearless warrior and not despising him for it.

I think the definite down side to this film was its desire to be a survival film. You could tell in a couple of scenes that it was trying a little too hard to lean that way and it didn’t really work. However, I completely respect and admire both the emotional journey, which came to a satisfactory conclusion, and the performances by Jaden and Will Smith. They complement each other perfectly and Jaden is definitely coming into his own as an actor.

Overall, a solid 6 out of 10.