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He can’t overcome the trauma of having watched an Ursa kill his sister while he cowered in a terrarium that kept his pheromones from the monster’s sniffer. For one thing, he’s never become a full-fledged Ranger, only a semi-promising cadet who’s an ace in class and a washout in the field. The heart of the movie is meant to be Kitai proving his worth to his father and himself. Shyamalan undercuts it with a big angry bird that turns into a lovebird. But there’s no follow-through to that idea. The film contains one piquant idea: Earth’s creatures have all evolved into man-eaters as if in revenge for what man hath wrought. As Cypher almost fades away, you may think, “Poor Will Smith: from ‘Six Degrees of Separation’ to six degrees of expiration.” Cypher treats himself with an arterial bypass. Kitai faces a herd of baboons and injects an anti-toxin straight into his heart following a poisonous leech bite.
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He must fend off fearsome creatures in phony CGI in order to snatch a working beacon from the sheared-off tail section of the plane, many miles away. As Cypher lies injured in the driver’s seat, Jaden, I mean, Kitai, must travel across hazardous terrain through an oxygen-depleted atmosphere. The movie eventually settles down to a “most dangerous game” sort of adventure. Some of the early scenes are like an unhappy mix of George Lucas and Ed Wood: At one point a spaceship sails out from a spaceport like a tossed-off Frisbee. When Cypher greets his wife “Faia” and tells her that soon he’ll be off to a planet that sounds like “L-Fehitos,” I wondered if the film were angling for a fajitas tie-in at a Mexican food chain.
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Perhaps it was the affected accent adopted by the whole Raige family, or the generally poor choice of character and place names. Maybe it was the elder Smith playing a cipher named Cypher. To be honest, I was giggling before the movie got that far. Cypher and Kitai – and, of course, the Ursa – are the sole survivors. The ship gets caught in an asteroid storm and plummets to the only halfway eco-friendly planet in crash-landing range. The main plot kicks in when Raige tries to get closer to his son Kitai (Jaden Smith) by taking him on his last mission, which includes transporting an Ursa to a Ranger base for use in “ghosting” exercises. These creatures are blind to people unless they can smell the pheromones that humans exude when they’re afraid – but they’re still able to arrange corpses artfully on spikes! The Ranger who discovered that you can “ghost” your way through a close encounter with an Ursa if you turn off your fear is the Prime Commander known (I kid you not) as Cypher Raige (played by Will Smith). Nova Prime is also the home of vicious alien and “Alien”-like monsters called “Ursa,” as if in homage to Sarah Douglas’ renegade of the same name in two “Superman” movies. Sadly, a thousand years later, there’s still a lot left for the Ranger Corps to do. Were the disasters ecological or geopolitical or both? The quicker-than-the-eye montage allows you to read in whatever floats – or rather, sinks – your boat. All too swiftly we learn that a global military force evacuated the world because of successive earth-shaking catastrophes, and relocated every human to the distant planet Nova Prime. Case in point: The latest Will Smith/Jaden Smith vehicle, “After Earth.” This post-apocalyptic sci-fi adventure gets smothered at birth with a blizzard of exposition.