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"Journey to the far side of the sun" (1969) tackled the same ground years ago (the doppelganger effect).
I read both reviews. Sorry I missed the links earlier... color didn't stand out to me. Chris didn't like. Tab loved. I'm more with the former than the later but not fair since I didn't finish. And as you so aptly pointed out this past year when I started to squawk over "Django" "you can't object to a movie unless you've seen it."
So there!
To review a film you need to see it all the way through, but to know you're unlikely to favor it you may need only watch a couple reels.
This has a surprise last image though, you missed that.
Thanks for the posts on Oblivion.
AFTER EARTH is pathetic.
Truly pathetic.
I've seen the trailer many times (on TV against my will and cringed at every single cut) and it is truly pathetic to toss this garbage at an audience.
Jaden Smith can't act and neither can his papa, who wrote this trash as a vehicle for him and his son.
I've read reviews that eviscerate it, saying it is "tired" and "patently ridiculous".
Will you be seeing it Chris?
It is certainly a very expensive vanity project. But we must not pronounce judgements on movies based on trailers (which we're way better not watching at all, all in all, for sure) or on the circumstances of the filmmaking per se. I am meaning to see it. After all, I liked Will and Jaden in Muccino's only successful Hollywood movie, THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS, though Jaden was just a tyke then and didn't have the main role. I don't believe in condemning something just because its makers are privileged. Many have jumped on the bandwagon and jumped on this movie. Manohla Dargis' de facto condemnation of it did her little credit. As a devil's advocate type, I was looking for those who take the other side and I was interested in the partially favorable comments on AFTER EARTH in the AV Club review. Their reviewer Ignatiy Vishnevetsky (whom I hadn't heard of) begins:Note that the trailer (the one I saw) is all talk, the "scientology" message Dargis didn't like, betraying the "clean and simple" stye and the large chunks that are dialogue-free (hard but not impossible to convey in a trailer). The trailer reduces the movie to a "message," when that may indeed stand out too much amid all the silence, but when it's the action that counts, when "the key to the treasure is the treasure."Quote:
For a $130 million vanity project, After Earth is remarkably lean. Conceived by Will Smith as a starring vehicle for his son, Jaden, the movie is a no-frills wilderness survival tale with sci-fi trappings. For most of its running time, its two major characters are the only people onscreen. Big chunks of the movie pass without dialogue. The set-up is clean and simple. . . [He gives it a C+]
There are musical families, there are artistic families, there are thespian families -- what about the Carridine family and the Barrymore family? Oh sure, Will Smith is no John Barrymore. Okay, my favorite Will Smith performance is in SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION, but I liked him okay in I AM LEGEND. He's good at smart, energetic schlock. He may have gone pretty soft in this one, giving junior a Class A vanity project where he only has to run around and wiggle his eyeborws, but why this should enrage us I don't know. It might amuse us. Or we might just shrug and move on. We'll see,if I see it, I'll let you know what I think. I meant to see it, I was kinda looking forward to it, but then I realized I had to see Ben Wheatley's SIGHTSEERS instead. I've really been wanting to see that, missed a couple of chances, and finally it opened in Berkeley's Landmark Shattuck Cinemas, where the best concentration of cool movies show around here (in San Francisco it's the Embarcadero, but the Shattuck has more auditoriums -- Embarcadero gets movies earlier a lot though, the East Bay being several notches below SF in the cruel release-time pecking order which NYC and LA are well at the top of).
Yesterday instead I watched NOW YOU SEE ME, a general disappointment, despite all the "stars," but the cinema is very nearby, and serves delicious (or at least above average) hamburgers, delivered to your seat, with attention to the slice of tomato, the sprig of crisp lettuce, the fresh onion, the above-average bun, and the lightly applied, special sauce. I had to see this instead of AFTER EARTH because of the comfort factor. Would I have enjoyed AFTER EARTH moreif it had been the movie available just down the street with the good hamburger? Doubtful, but you never know. I'd certainly have been better off upstairs at this theater watching the latest British National Theater production of THIS HOUSE, which was showing at the same time, but those are reserved seating and you have to buy tickets well ahead.
I'm trying to find the reviewer that said: "One, how can animals evolve to hate humans if they've been absent from the planet? Two, how can animals evolve in a 1,000 years when it takes nature millions of years to make even small adjustments to evolutionary traits?" Go figure.
The "After Earth" bashing is pretty much across the board (Metacritic is 31; Cream of the Crop? 11 out of 100!). Biggest complaint? Jaden Smith wasn't ready for a leading role... the plot stinks... Will Smith had too much to say on the production. Thus ended the lesson on how to lose your shirt making a Will Smith sci-fi summer blockbuster after he's made so many (it's just plain bad).
I don't find the idea of animal populations multiplying and turning feral and roaming the earth turning hostile to humans in a thousand years so hard to conceive. Nor did I think that fanciful elements were unexpected or out of order in a sci-fi action movie.
But yes, of course, cinemabon, as Dargis said and others have too, there was nobody to say "NO" to Will Smith on this production. But come to think of it, isn't that just the situation we want for an auteur? Do we miss somebody from production teling Antonioni, "No, you can't have these long empty silent shots"? I know, I kno: Will Smith/Shyamalan aren't Antonioni.
But again, you have not seen it, right? Or even two reels of it? I would not declare myself on my own "it's just plain bad" without having seen it. "That's not who we are" :). Granted, the reviews are terrible; the highest Metacritic review is a 63.
Most movies are basically competent. Only a few are great and a few are terrible. I think it will be remarkable if AFTER EARTH really turns out to be one of the special few truly terrible ones.
This is not to deny that something has gone seriously wrong with the majority of critics and at the box office and probably for the reasons we have already discussed.
I am exhausting a great deal of verbiage on a film I have not even seen. But of course it is fun to discuss these things. Ignorance frees the tongue.
Don't forget what the AV Club writer said: AFTER EARTH is "remarkably lean.....clean and simple." I like the sound of that -- given the overstuffed quality of every blockbuster you ever see, whether FAST & FURIOUS 6, which I liked, or STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS, which bored me, or the initially witty IRON MAN 3 that descends into mess and noise as they almost all do.
As you might expect, Armond White of City Arts, being both contrarian and black, has a different take on AFTER EARTH in his review entitled "Like Father, Like Ingenue." He sees black themes of survival in a tough world, ghetto replaced by an unforgiving nature.
Quote:
Race consciousness is implicit in the saga of both males’ survival. It transfers the stereotypical urban walkabout of drugs and gangs drama into a primal setting where Kitai tests himself against nature
No Caucasian viewer would see images of bodies among trees and think of lyncings: any mature and thoughtful black man watching a film about an African American father and son in danger might. White contrasts Cipher/Will's advice to Jaden, "Danger is real, Fear is a choice," with Diann Carrol's welfare mother in CLAUDINE to her son, "You’d better be scared. This world will kill you!” He compares Will's character's idea of "ghosting" with Lawrence Dunbar's poem about Blacks in America, "We wear the mask." White writers and viewers would not see these comparisons. White points out "Cypher", Will's character's name, is a hip hop term for community or training ground -- another thing not noted by most reviewers.Quote:
But whether dull or exciting, After Earth’s new genre–Hip-Hop Sci-Fi–replaces 50s Cold War metaphors and pulp video-game escapism with a morality tale about growing into manhood and responsibility. It’s exactly the unusual hybrid one might expect a thoughtful Black filmmaker to initiate. . . .
Two images stand out: A shot of male bodies pierced by tree branches that connotes lynching and a post-apocalypse montage of urban destruction cannily resembling old news footage of riot-torn cities. Smith’s audience might not catch the significance of these images among the film’s unoriginal, Avatar-biting CGI, that’s why the story takes place after the end of history.
White does not exaggerate AFTER EARTH'S artistic merit. He calls Will's performance "one and a half note," Shyamalan's direction "lethargic," KItai's "obstacle course" "sub-Apocalypto," and the movie "not profound" but finds these meanings and says "Boys without fathers " are "the target audience, the theme "a youth seeking to bond with his macho military father by emulating his masculine strength." He even compares Kitai shivering in the rain with the Moorehouse College students shivering in the rain as Obama addressed them recently.[In urban slang "cipher" can mean a lot of things (all new to me), but meanings include a hip hop rapper community free-styling. Whether or not that's referenced in the film I don't know, but the hip hop slang resonance seems likely.]Quote:
Shots of Jaden freezing in the cold may remind contemporary viewers of those Moorehouse College graduates getting drenched in rain while President Obama, under a canopy, lectured them not to make excuses after spending four years doing undergraduate work.
I'm sure to what movie that cinemabon is referring to when he wrote "Journey to the far side of the sun" (1969) tackled the same ground years ago (the doppelganger effect).
As for "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951), it was strange that I left it off my list and I did so deliberately. I have seen it many times and it continues to stand out for me since I was a child. I would have to say that I have fallen into the new and innovative intriguing trap whereby such a classic movie has been worn out for me and that Patricia Neal's other overlooked movie had more emotional impact on me more recently, being so unexpected and thus used her more recent movie as a replacement. I was getting real, real tried coming up with all the movies that I felt had some significant association with my relationship theme.
I will admit that AFTEREARTH is more of a psychological mystery thriller with a singular, but important science fiction element as a fundamental background setting. But I found the sci fi element resonating underneath throughout the movie and that was what made the movie so special for me. Like real life, we carry around these life themes and core beliefs that enter into our very normal everyday activities, beliefs and emotions. How this sci fi theme played out in the context with these people's lives offered a much deeper and insightful awareness than almost any movie I've experienced.
I appreciate the comments of Armond White who is very insightful and also very much his own man, so to speak.
White's Top 10 Ever (as of 2012)
Avventura, L' (Michelangelo Antonioni)
Intolerance (D.W. Griffith)
Jules et Jim (François Truffaut)
Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean)
Lola (Jacques Demy)
Magnificent Ambersons, The (Orson Welles)
Nashville ( Robert Altman)
Nouvelle Vague (Jean-Luc Godard)
Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer)
Sansho Dayu 1 (Mizoguchi Kenji)
White's Top 10 Ever (as of 2002):
A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Spielberg)
L'avventura (Antonioni)
Intolerance (Griffith)
Jules et Jim (Truffaut)
Lawrence of Arabia (Lean)
Lola (Demy)
The Magnificent Ambersons (Welles)
Masculin féminin (Godard)
Nashville (Altman)
The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer)
A rather big change in White's list over the decade with A.I. being on top in 2002 and dropping out completely ten years later while other lower ranking 2002 candidates managed to retain White's favor.
By the way, why is White's list being posted on this thread?
Read CK's last comment, posted this evening.
That White should refer to the film this way does not surprise me since the protagonist is AA. I would expect him to see everything from his perspective both as a critic and being black. White seldom agrees with other critics; otherwise, how would he gain the reputation of being "the contrarian." While I respect White as an intellect and someone devoted to film and film criticism, I do not agree with his choices nor his opinion when it comes to many movies - especially Steven Spielberg's "A.I." which Chris, Johann, Oscar and I got into an endless argument over about three or four years ago on this site that went for page after page (I don't remember if you were in on that Tab or not).
I deplore children being depicted as victims as Spielberg did and I won't go into that film and be goaded into an endless debate all over again. It's one of the few movies I walked out of and it would not be the first time that a critic on the level of White is wrong about a movie, not that I'm piling on because, as Chris point out, NONE Of US has seen this film and we all seem to be taking sides!!!!
So we either see it or we should move on. Speaking of movies... Ethan Hawk was on Jimmy Fallon talking about "Before Midnight" and its gotten such rave reviews (except from you Chris) that I thought I'd like to see it. Oscar said it was one of his favorite films of the year. It's set to debut in theaters next week after doing the film festival run since January. I see it was at SSFF (if I got the initials right) and Sundance. Lots of 9 out of 10 on IMDB, too.
No more "reviews" of reviews. Chris is right. We need to discuss films we've seen and not rely on what others are saying... including White who is Black and feels this is all about race, which it isn't because it's a M. Night Shyamalan film, or isn't it? I don't know... because I have seen it, nor has anyone else who writes on this site!!!!!!!!!!!!!
What does listing White's top films mean especially having two lists from different decades? Is this to inform us that he's changed his way of evaluating, judging films? How? That AFTER EARTH doesn't nearly compare with these films? What do these films have in common anyway? That White has some common theme prejudice and filters how he views AFTER EARTH?
It's strange in looking over my notes, that I never wrote down my thoughts about A.I. when I saw the movie, and even more shocked that I never rated the movie on IMDb. But 2001 a turbulent year for me I recall. I do know that I really was intrigued and very connected with the movie on a personal level because I imagined myself having to go through this journey myself in many ways and I still am.
AI is a topic best relegated to its old thread, which I think is here: http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.p...-Spielberg-etc
Thanks Oscar and cinembon, for the positive focus on Armond White. He is a critic I always like to consult. He can not only be wrong but jaw-droppingly wrong, and even vicious. But the intelligence and fresh point of view, seriousness, and passion for French cinema make up for all that.
I HAVE now seen AFTER EARTH and I'm working on a review.
By the way, Shyamalan is non-white.