Future Shock

Even as the world has not quite gotten over Shyamalan-bashing, Shyamalan himself has moved on to a reasonably good piece of work in After Earth. The Pursuit of Happyness showed the intense father-son pairing of Will Smith and Jaden Smith. After Earth takes us to the same pairing. A spaceship carying the duo crash-lands on a (now abandoned by humans) Earth. With lead Will Smith (Cypher Paige) incapacitated, son Jaden Smith (Kitai Paige) is entrusted with a perilous mission to cross a hundred kilometers of hostile terrain to activate an emergency beacon. With an Earth that is perhaps labeled a tad more hostile than the way it has evolved, and friends and enemies alike in nature, Kitai has to battle a plethora of calamities and a paucity of resources, and draws upon generous doses of inspirational pep talk to get to his objective. A movie that has, at the time of writing, faced the harshness of (clearly undeserved) extreme reviews

13/20

The (Hopefully) Last Airbender

The irrepressible M Night Shyamalan will not be kept from bringing fables to the big screen, that somehow do not seem to click, as far as all recent attempts have gone. Aang (Noah Ringer) of the Air people, is The Last Airbender, preserved for a hundred years in ice even as his people have been decimated by the Fire People. It takes two intrepid Water People – Katara (Nicola Peltz) and Sokka (Jackson Rathbone) to discover Aang from under the ice, and then embark on a journey to unite the peoples, and in particular manage the military onslaught from the martial Fire People. Where the movie seems to have failed is execution. A cast that does not click as far as pretty much any and every role is concerned. Hideous acting with uninspiring central characters that chokes off any upside potential from the above-average special effects. While the Director has made no secret of seeking sequels herein, it remains to be seen whether, with this combination of cast and crew, the audience is likely to bite

10/20