Just days after we got a post-apocalyptic view of the future Earth in director Joseph Kosinski’s first trailer for “Oblivion,” Columbia Pictures has released the very first trailer for M. Night Shyamalan’s upcoming sci-fi action adventure “After Earth” starring Will Smith and his now teenage son Jaden Smith.
Take a look at the trailer to see what you think of “After Earth.”
The plot for “After Earth” is pretty straight forward:
- One thousand years after cataclysmic events forced humanity’s escape from Earth, Nova Prime has become mankind’s new home. Legendary General Cypher Raige (Will Smith) returns from an extended tour of duty to his estranged family, ready to be a father to his 13-year-old son, Kitai (Jaden Smith). When an asteroid storm damages Cypher and Kitai’s craft, they crash-land on a now unfamiliar and dangerous Earth. As his father lies dying in the cockpit, Kitai must trek across the hostile terrain to recover their rescue beacon. His whole life, Kitai has wanted nothing more than to be a soldier like his father. Today, he gets his chance.
While M. Night Shyamalan burst onto the big screen with the hit “The Sixth Sense” and followed it with the decent “Unbreakable,” his track record since then seems to have been on an unprecedented decline. His faults seem to stem from when he makes original material that he himself has written. Luckily, he has help from the writer of “Syriana,” Stephen Ganghan, and “Book of Eli” writer Gary Whitta. Hopefully, a collaborative effort with these other writers will help him overcome the hurdle of his movie’s storylines unraveling during the film.
The visuals in the film look exciting and kind of reminiscent of Pandora seen in “Avatar,” mixed with some of the devolved future seen in the recent “Cloud Atlas.” Not that this a bad thing, but when things have been seen before, they seem to lose the awe-inspiring effect of journeying to a place for the first time.
While the entire story has yet to be revealed and we do know that Will Smith’s Cypher is injured during the crash landing, I’m not sure how much of the film he will actually be in since the movie seems to be a starring vehicle for his son. Many questions are raised during the trailer, images are shown of people running away from a ship, and we don’t know if this is a flashback from Earth or from mankind’s new home, Nova Prime.
Another major component that seems to be missing is why we left Earth in the first place and if humans have been absent for the past thousand years, then how or why would the local creatures and vegetation have evolved to kill a threat that wasn’t present? Those are just a few facts that will hopefully be filled in as the story is unraveled with further footage or descriptions.
That being said, I look forward to seeing father and son onscreen together again because I was very impressed by their first pairing in 2006’s “The Pursuit of Happyness.” Obviously, they will have great chemistry and even though Shyamalan has had a few duds in his career, Will Smith has yet to be in a movie in the last decade that wasn’t a financial success — although not all of them have been critically praised — so maybe we can give this film a chance before condemning it and take faith that the stars and other writers can help M. Night Shyamalan recapture the magic he once held in moviemaking.
“After Earth” crash lands in theaters June 7, 2013, and also stars Isabelle Fuhrman, Zoë Kravitz, Kristofer Hivju and Chris Geere.
. . .
Follow Adam Poynter on Twitter at http://twitter.com/CCWGGuy.
And don’t forget to “Like” It’s Just Movies on Facebook at
http://www.facebook.com/itsjustmovies.