But there's me wishing I was watching a much better film. He does not work as a military dad who was probably raised by Vulcans. Smith is an affable man and does will in affable roles. Smith is at his best playing charming, witty, likeable or even mischievously sly characters. Instead we end up with the worst of both worlds- a generic, dime a dozen jungle setting and pedestrian adversaries too.

So why not make it an alien planet and show us some cool, alien designs instead? Let your imagination run wild instead of just having Tolkienesque eagles and some tiger-hyena things. How does a city look after being abandoned for so long? What sort of challenges would you face crossing a city that has been dead for a millennium? For a creative mind like Shaymalan's there are some real possibilities here. Setting a film on earth 1000 years after it was abandoned could have some cool concepts to knock about. Why the fuck is this film set on earth? The entire film takes place in a jungle so it might as well be Pandora. And as a videogame it might have been far less boring. All the gimmicks, such as Jayden's suit changing colour to respond to danger, the multiple mode blade weapon thing (Hey I have an idea, why not give your soldiers GUNS AS WELL!) the way Will is always feeding orders and advice to Jayden. This film feels like it would have made a far better videogame. All the while being hunted by various horribly rendered fauna and an Ursa that the ship was transporting for training. Will is too injured to move so it falls to Jayden to go to tail section of the ship- which crashes 100km away- to fetch the distress beacon. Oh by the way despite having no sense of sight or presumably other means or sensing the surround terrain, the Ursa have no problems moving over terrain, avoiding gaps and pits and even manoeuvring in three dimensions.Īnyway through a FAR too long and contrived sequence the Smiths crash on earth whereupon they are the only survivors. So Will Smith plays a general who is supposed to be real hot shit at killing these Starship Troopers hand-me-downs as he can 'ghost' meaning turn off his fear, so he becomes invisible to them. My theory is that one left the air conditioner on and they all melted. So Earth trains the fear out of its soldiers.

So you can stand right in front of them and they don't attack so long as you're not scared. Not only can these things only hunt by smell, they can only detect the smell of fear. Makes them more effective doesn't it? Well that's not even half of the stupid. If I was genetically engineering a killing machines I'd give it every sense I could think of. No sight, no hearing, NO OTHER SENSE EXCEPT SMELL. And these Ursa hunt by smell.Īnd only smell. So humanity buggers off and colonizes another planet when suddenly ALIENS! However these aliens don't fight humanity directly (Possibly because we have wooden doors and access to lots of water), they send out specially engineered feral killing machines called Ursa to do it. Humanity kills earth because STOCK FOOTAGE OF POLLUTION. Here's the basic spiel from the info dump at the start of the movie. And of course running away from the Ursa. Running away from giant eagles, baboons and big cats. It's Jayden Smith running away from an assortment of incredibly bad CGI animals. The action set pieces are mostly just Jayden Smith running away from things, and. I mean, it is bad- don't get me wrong, however it's also horribly boring. The problem with After Earth isn't that it's bad.

After earth 3d