Rate After Earth (2013)

I watched it for the first time earlier this week. It was pretty bad, but let's start with the pros. I had a feeling M. Night Shyamalan had a vision of how he wanted his world/universe to be and that can be seen from time to time. The premise, while not that original, could work if it had better direction. Also the cinematography (Peter Suschitzky) is pretty good. There's a shot with humans on a tree early in the movie and I can still remember that it was a very good shot. It's also nice that, at least as far as I can remember, there was (almost) no shaky cam, not even in the fight scenes.

But everything else is bad, like really bad. Filled with stupid or completely illogical decisions and events. The idea that everything has evolved to kill humans is never explained in a way that makes any sense. And even worse is that earth isn't actually that dangerous. It just looks like a ancient earth, not like a planet where everything kills humans. The only thing that's actually dangerous is that stupid Ursa that they brought with them. You can see Will Smith is trying his best to deliver a decent performance and that prevents his performance from being truly terrible (it's just mediocre), but Jaden Smith really didn't knock it out of the park this time. Quite the opposite, that was a very bad performance. But the worst part by far is the writing. For example 'I like it, but I think it's bad'. That was such a cringeworthy line. I couldn't stop laughing after 'Denied, sit down!'. The people working on this movie can't possibly have thought that any of these lines were even remotely good. It also doesn't work that it's one of the most predictable and therefore suspenseless sci-fi movies I've ever seen. I didn't care about that final fight scene and the scenes after that at all. I wasn't invested in the characters and the CG in the fight scenes looked amateurish. Actually the entire movie felt very amateurish in its direction, to the point where it annoyed me. The exposition dumps were so obvious, uninteresting and the line delivery is annoying. The supposed character development feels fake & emotionless and contradicts itself at times. It isn't the worst movie ever made or something like that. There were a few good ideas, but it was destroyed in its execution. A 3/10 for me.