After Earth - SPOILER LADEN critique

After Earth is the second movie I've seen starring father-son team Will & Jaden Smith. I really like both actors and loved the performances they put in for The Pursuit of Happyness. I had high hopes going into this movie. Two talented actors doing sci-fi! What could go wrong?

Do NOT see this movie.

First off Will & Jaden were, for some reason, using some unidentifiable accent that meant almost every line came out as wooden and poorly acted. More than wooden, rigid would be a better word I think. It was painful to listen to. I strongly suspect if I'd watched the movie muted I would have enjoyed it more. The absolutely awful father-son dynamic was beyond stereotypical "military-father distant from emotional son who needs him" that we've come to expect... not enjoy, but expect. M. Night Shyamalan took that dynamic and stretched it into some exaggerated caricature of the trope. It was beyond ham-handed. It was brutally painful to watch... and listen to with those heinous fake accents.

The science in the movie was absurd beyond belief. We (humanity) have destroyed the Earth. What that means in left-wing hippy talk is we've made it uninhabitable to humans. Wildlife is doing just fine! For some reason people can't live on the planet because it's too inimical to sustain human life but all other life on the planet is bigger, faster, better, meaner, and more abundant than ever before! Herds of bison are back roaming the plains! Baboons & Hyenas roam the forests along with giant, and when I say giant I mean big enough to pick up Jaden and carry him around giant, condors that are... because animals are better than people... kind to the only human. See, the condor's chicks got eaten by a pack of tiger things. Tigers hunt in packs like wolves now... and since Jaden fought off the tiger pack defending the condor chicks Mama Condor must save Jaden's life when the planet does it's nightly freeze. Yeah. It freezes every night, completely. Lakes & streams freeze over & the breath literally freezes on Jaden's face... but life as we know it thrives there except for people. Seriously, the science is beyond ridiculous. All of these evolutionary changes happened in how long? Almost exactly a thousand years. Yup. Twice since Jesus was born the ecology of Earth could completely change to something so completely foreign to what it is now as to be almost unrecognizable. Science happens to other movies!

The tech is also suspect. There are emergency beacons on the ship that evidently only had twelve people on it, 10 of whom died when it crashed on Earth. The beacons can only be activated by holding it up until you get a signal, kind of like a cell phone with no bars. Then you have to press a button and hold it until it sends the flare thingee up to outer-space. Now, if you're attacked by a monster during time it won't go off. You have to hold down the button the entire time. If you're attacked then it means you start over after fighting off the monster.

Monster... a space faring monster that evidently exists solely to hunt humans... and scares them so that they give off a fear pheromone because they're blind and deaf... but they invented space travel? What? Ugh. Dear Lord.

Bad acting. Bad science. Bad tech. Bad monster. Bad movie. Don't go. Don't let anybody you like go. Save yourself.