"After Earth" is, all things considered, a fairly small-scale story, and the conscious decision to create such a large world and then focus on two characters almost exclusively feels at first like a mistake. Ultimately, though, the film reveals that its true intent is to create a boy's adventure movie that externalizes the basic stresses and fears of parenthood, and its modest goals turn out to be an asset. This may not be the biggest bang for the buck this summer, but it's lovely to see something that is sincere, thematically focused, and that ultimately works in a way I didn't expect.
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Maybe it's the father-son act of Will and Jaden Smith that also has some people cracking their knuckles and sharpening their knives. Keep in mind, I'm not talking about people who have seen the film and didn't like it, but the ramp up over the last few weeks where I've seen people who have absolutely not seen the film railing on it anyway. Whatever the case, it feels unfair to me. "After Earth" is very straightforward, and there is a sincerity to it that is easily mocked but also admirable in an age where almost everything has a sort of winking post-modern stance. There are certainly choices here that baffle me, like naming a character "Cypher Raige" or some of the dialogue that sounds like it comes out of a self-empowerment seminar, but for the most part, I think this is a strong example of a certain type of film that rarely gets made these days.
I've noticed that for the most part, there are films that are blatantly aimed at children and the "family" audience, and there are films that are aimed at grown-ups that are okay for kids to see as well, but there are very few films made that seem aimed at a young teen audience specifically. Now that there's this "young adult" category, which feels to me like they're essentially making grown-up films that are aged down slightly and angsted up enormously, it feels like they're serving this audience but on a superficial level. In the '80s, a film like "Young Sherlock Holmes" or "Explorers" or even "The Goonies" wasn't given a label like "young adult" because no such thing existed. Instead, they were just films that happened to have young protagonists facing high concept situations, and "After Earth" seems like a movie that would be beloved by a generation of kids if it had come out between 1983 and 1989.