When
I was a young boy, I received for Christmas one year a book with the (now
politically-incorrect…) title Adventures for Boys.
After
avidly reading the selections within that anthology, I devoured other, similar
stories of outdoor adventure such as Jack London’s (1876 – 1916) The
Call of the Wild (1903), and White Fang (1906).
Those
tales featured genuine simplicity -- or clarity
-- of theme and morality, and to this day, I find that writing voice and
style appealing.
Almost
universally set in a harsh climate or natural terrain, these “adventures for boys” also concerned, specifically, a character’s rite of passage, even if the character
in question happens to be a canine.
M.
Night Shyamalan’s new and much-maligned science fiction movie After Earth (2013) is an affair
in an almost identical vein. It’s a
boy-against nature, rite-of-passage movie, and one uncluttered by story fat or extraneous plotting and incident.
In
fact, After Earth is a stream-lined, enjoyable adventure for
boys and girls. And likes its literary antecedents, the film even
focuses on a very specific philosophy of
life, and explores that (spiritual) way of knowing with a surfeit of clarity, even grace. And I'm not talking about Scientology, either.
In
short, the film is more enjoyable, and worthwhile
than I anticipated it would be, and much more so than most reviews have indicated.
After
Earth is set
in the distant future. Man has left Earth behind after polluting and ruining
it.
One
thousand years after that exodus and re-settlement on another world, Nova
Prime, man has established himself as an interstellar presence.
Unfortunately,
a competing alien race has bred monstrous predators called the Ursa who can
smell our fear, and who are engineered to do nothing but hunt and murder humans.
On
a routine space mission aboard a ship called the Hesper, a hero father, Cypher
Raige (Will Smith) and his estranged, troubled teenage son, Kitai Rage (Jaden
Smith) face danger when their ranger ship encounters an “asteroid storm.”
The
ship crashes on wild, untamed Earth, after cracking into pieces. Alas, a rescue beacon is located on the tail
section of the ship…located more than fifty miles away from the fore section’s
crash site.
Side-lined
by a severe leg injury, Cypher must send his inexperienced son into the wild
alone to retrieve the rescue beacon and send a distress call to the authorities.
Making
matters more dangerous, the Hesper was carrying in its hold a deadly Ursa
captive, a creature now unloosed on Earth and ready to resume hunting human
survivors.
Cypher
has mastered the art of “ghosting,” of suppressing his fear so that the Ursa
can’t detect his presence. But his son,
Kitai, has no such experience…
In
my introduction above, I wrote about After Earth’s central,
fully-explored theme or philosophy. That philosophy of life -- short and sweet
-- is mindfulness: the attentive awareness
of the reality of things; of the happenings of the moment. It’s a Buddhist belief, but also one that has
been adopted in contemporary psychological counseling.
Mindfulness
is considered one way of understanding life, and of vanquishing emotions that
aren’t important, or serve no useful purpose.
And in After Earth, mindfulness is the gateway to adulthood and the
key to survival in a frightening situation.
Specifically,
Cypher delivers a lengthy monologue about the nature of fear, and how, via the
auspices of mindfulness, he was able to subtract fear from his mental
gestalt. Cypher describes danger as “real”
but fear as nothing but a choice, an
emotion that is “imaginary.”
Hence, it can be controlled.
Cypher’s
key to short-circuiting the un-real aspect of fear, as he describes it, is his
recognition of his immediate, surrounding environment. He describes a terrifying battle with an
Ursa, and how fear left his body. His eyes registered sunlight. He describes the sight of his own blood. But Cypher distanced himself from his
emotions even as he tuned into his environment, so he could survive. In a crisis, Cypher suggests, we must deal with what surrounds
us, instead of imaginary boogeymen that are unreal, and therefore unrelated to the life-and-death struggle at hand.
Mindfulness
is the philosophy that guides and informs After Earth, but the mode of that philosophy’s transmission
is of equal interest to the message itself.
This is a film about generations, and about fathers-and-sons,
specifically.
Indeed,
one might gaze upon the film in its entirety as a metaphor for fathering (or on
a bigger scale, parenting in general).
Here a father must share with his child the way he sees the world, and
then hope that this very knowledge will be useful when that boy must stand up
and fight alone.
Without being maudlin
about it, the movie is about the wisdom we impart to our children.
And,
of course, it’s absolute murder to see the boy stand up and fight alone, when
it’s clear that Cypher wants nothing more than to fight Kitai’s battles for
him.
That’s
an urge all parents feel and yet, in some important instances, must
resist. We send our children out into
the world knowing that we can’t always be there for them, but that, hopefully,
the things we taught them will resonate and prove meaningful. Those seeds will
sprout in their memories, and they will survive and endure, and then -- one day -- pass on their version of that
knowledge to the next generation.
The
father-son relationship in After Earth is emotionally-moving
because even a helpful philosophy such as mindfulness can be perceived, in
certain situations, as negative.
From
the outside, it looks a lot like distance, or the lack of feeling...the lack of love. As Kitai's mother suggests, he is a sensitive, intuitive, feeling boy, one who needs a father, not a philosopher or commander. He doesn't understand why his father is so remote. There is a price to pay for mindfulness, for always living life in the "ghosting" mode, in the film's vernacular.
In terms of family issues, Cypher
and Kitai both experienced a tragedy involving a family member, and Cypher doesn’t know how to
handle his guilt. So he deploys
mindfulness in his family life too, but there is a cost to those around him.
Cypher -- adhering to the stoicism of mindfulness -- can’t reach out emotionally, because he believes emotions don’t
help in a crisis. Cypher has been
practicing mindfulness in his personal life for so long that he forgets what it
means to really connect with someone. In
other words, the very philosophy that keeps him alive is the thing that keeps
him from truly connecting with his son.
Accordingly,
After
Earth reaches its zenith of emotion during its climax, when Cypher
attempts to express his new-found regard and respect for Kitai in a kind of socially-acceptable but
ordered and restrained gesture: a military salute.
Delightfully -- and outside of movie tradition -- Kitai doesn’t reciprocate.
Instead, he
hugs his father, an absolute assertion that sometimes emotionality, not mindfulness, is the key to life.
Thus,
like all children, Kitai has taken his father’s “lesson” and interpreted it in a
way that is meaningful to him as an individual.
That is the very rite-of-passage meted in the film: Kitai’s ability to understand
his father’s choice, and then to make his own meaningful choice about whom he
hopes to be.
The
movie is about nothing more and nothing less than that kernel of an idea: one man’s way of seeing
the world and his son coming to understand that “vision..." and divine his own belief system from it.
Sadly,
you likely won’t read about any of this thematic substance in the majority of
mainstream critical reviews. Instead, the
reviews for After Earth have been harsh, even savage.
That
rampant negativity is a result, I suspect, of a perfect storm of bile and jealousy:
the continuing backlash against Shyamalan (because he dared to trick us with The
Sixth Sense [1999] and then minted a fortune), and the relatively fresh
backlash against Will Smith and his son Jaden.
So
if hating is the game, After Earth is a two-fer!
I should also state this fact: After Earth isn't a movie about Scientology. I've read reviewers insist it's about Scientology because -- wait for it -- there's a volcano placed prominently in the action. I suppose this means that Star Trek: Into Darkness and Revenge of the Sith (a whole planet of volcanoes there!) are also about Scientology. Who knew?
Perhaps more to the point, even if After Earth did feature principles of Scientology, would that fact immediately, a priori, render it a bad film? Does the same rule apply to Catholicism or other branches of Christianity, or only to unpopular religions?
But I'm not in the business of defending movies, only watching them, interpreting them, and presenting my analysis. Having seen and enjoyed the film, I conclude that it is a well-made, enjoyable “adventure for
boys” (and girls too…) -- nothing more, nothing less -- with an authentic sense of humanity. It
is a simple, straightforward "shipwreck" movie, and parts of the adventure reminded me of Robinson
Crusoe and Swiss Family Robinson.
The production design is original and compelling, and the location
shooting transforms Earth into the most vividly dangerous of wildernesses.
We
live now in a culture of noisy, hectic movie blockbusters, where event piles upon
events, where there are feints and counter-feints, and where “surprises” and
reversals come at the audience by the dozen (and often in 3-D to boot). We leave the theater after such films not
exhilarated and moved, but throttled.
Refreshingly,
After
Earth doesn’t care about throttling you, or layering on a multitude of
high-intensity incidents. Instead -- and
much like The Call of the Wild or White Fang -- the film simply and
directly vets its adventurous tale of extraordinary survival, and of a father and son
discovering each other.
The
key is that After Earth accomplishes those tasks with heart, and a considerable degree of humanity. It's a shame people aren't looking at the movie with open eyes and open hearts, but bitterness instead. It's more fun, I suppose, to fit the movie into another edition of the "M. Night Shyamalan-has-lost-it" narrative than to grapple with the ideas the movie actually presents.
Frankly, I think the critics could use a lesson in mindfulness.
So you may love After Earth, or you may hate it, I guess. But when you watch the film, at least do this much: drop your expectations and biases, be in the moment, and judge the work for yourself.