8) After Earth (2013)
In case anyone was wondering, this is the awful movie alluded to in the introduction. And it really is awful. (I actually watched it twice, just to check – but this turned out to be the film-lover’s version of itching a mosquito bite: You know it’s a bad idea, you do it anyway, and sure enough, it just makes everything ten times worse).
Prior to After Earth’s release in 2013, everyone had been wondering what the outcome was going to be of M. Night Shyamalan, who was so well known for his supernatural/psychological thrillers and occasionally brilliant plot twists (see The Sixth Sense, above), taking a sudden twist of his own into the land of uninhibited science fiction.
Was this going to prove to be his making? Was science fiction perhaps going to wrest his career away from the jaws of doom that just kept opening wider and wider with every new release (The Lady in the Water….The Happening…..The Last Airbender)? The answer, in short, was no. The result instead was a movie with the kind of power to make you seriously question all the life choices that have brought you to the moment in which you’re watching it.
Even the pairing of Will Smith and son (Jaden), that showed such promise in The Pursuit of Happyness back in 2006 couldn’t save After Earth from the plot holes, the script contradictions and the many inconsistencies (possibly because both Smiths gave the most magnificently terrible performances themselves): After Earth is a fine example of everything that can – and will – go wrong in this genre, if one does not know what the hell one is doing. As a general summary it remains only to say, “Hey, Shyamalan, science fiction just called – it said……well it said you can keep this one. Just keep it – please. We don’t want it back. Any of it. Ever.”
However. Once we’ve suffered through the giant baboons, family feuds, sabre-tooth cats, and accidental adoptions by giant eagles (if this had been an 80s children’s TV show it could have been pretty decent), there is, in the final scene, a flash of something deeper – something almost clever. This is the shot of the rescue ship flying over Earth’s ocean as it leaves the planet, an ocean in which we see that there are now hundreds of blue whales.
It is true that by the time After Earth reached its finale the audience were not so much begging for the end as they were debating whether to actually serve the thing with a cease and desist notice, but this one single shot suddenly injects a completely different tone into the movie’s conclusion, and a notion that this movie has something else to say other than…..than whatever it was that it was trying to say the rest of the time.
Throughout After Earth, there have been mentions of whales: Kitai’s mother mentions to Cypher that Kitai is reading his late sister’s favourite book, which we later discover to be Moby Dick. Later, in a – flashback? Stored memory?? – some-kind-of-communication-with-his-dead-daughter, she holds the book up to Cypher and asks whether it’s true that man used to kill these creatures. Cypher answers yes – and tells her that they were hunted until they had all but disappeared from the earth. Later still, when Kitai is dreaming of his sister, he tells her that he has part of Moby Dick memorised.
It is fairly safe to say that no-one had the slightest idea quite how Moby Dick was meant to tie in with space travel, volcanoes, and “ghosting,” but in that final shot there is a powerful sense of environmentalism, and a sudden, sharp reminder that if mankind wasn’t on it, much of planet Earth could flourish in unimaginable ways.
There was a brief environmental comment in the movie’s introduction, when Kitai describes how Earth had been a paradise until we destroyed it, his voice accompanied by footage of a series of environmental catastrophes presumably brought about by man – and it seems from the last shot of the whales that perhaps After Earth was meant to be a warning to mankind all along, and that Shyamalan simply hid this message very well within a more assuredly Hollywood-esque blockbuster (‘very well’ doesn’t even begin to cover it: International spies could learn something from how well that message is hidden).
But even if that wasn’t what Shyamalan is saying – even if his attitude to including the whales was the same as it seems to have been for the rest of the movie (“yeah, what the hell, chuck a few more incoherent bits of story in there – maybe we’ll get one of those occasions where a tornado blows through a scrap yard and accidentally assembles a car”), the idea – and the sight – of blue whales existing in this number, free from man’s horrendous impact on their existence, is still strikingly beautiful, and leaves an impression of the sort that the rest of the film most certainly did not.
Lucky escape, Shyamlan. Lucky escape.