ZERO STARS/****
starring Will Smith, Jaden Smith, Sophie Okenedo, Zoë Kravitz
screenplay by Gary Whitia and M. Night Shyamalan
directed by M. Night Shyamalan
by Angelo Muredda Give M. Night Shyamalan this much: he is
not a timid filmmaker. Where some might have responded to the critical drubbing
of The
Village with a shrug, Shyamalan turned his follow-up,
ostensibly a children's story, into a vicious riposte. Lady in the Water isn't just an off-kilter fairytale about an endangered waif who
falls out of the sky and into Paul Giamatti's swimming pool: it's also a deranged
manifesto for protecting the imaginative freedom of artists like
Shyamalan–playing a writer who will one day be martyred for his ideas,
collected in a volume modestly titled "The Cookbook"–against
critics and nonbelievers, who meet deservedly bad ends. That would be a gutsy
move if the artist had something to die for himself, yet the best you could say
for Lady in the Water is that at least Bob Balaban's beast-ravaged movie
reviewer is spared the finale with a saviour eagle that Shyamalan has the gall
to christen "Eaglet." Though nominally a star vehicle for Will Smith
and his son Jaden, After
Earth covers much the same ground, down to its
repetition of both the aquila
ex machina trope and half-assed nomenclature. (A
double-sided spear is a "cutlass" in the future, while walking
stealthily is now "ghosting." No word on what we call spoons or
actual cutlasses.) Lady
in the Water's world-building by crayon doodles can be
explained away easily enough by its bedtime-story mechanics, but there's no
excuse for After
Earth, a thinly-sketched, unbearably haughty
survival story that cites Moby-Dick as it steals from Suzanne Collins.
Once known for his twist endings, Shyamalan
seems content now to blow the premise in the title, which foretells the family
Smith's shipwrecking on a post-apocalyptic Earth stalked by super-evolved
animals with a bloodlust for humans. At least that's what Smith Sr., a
military commander with the unfortunate name Cypher Raige, tells cadet son
Kitai (Jaden Smith) after he's sidelined in the crash. Kitai, armed with
humanity's highest-grade form-fitting jumpsuit, portable hospital, and
communications system–forget Google Glass: in the future we'll communicate via 16:9 touchscreen tablets embedded in our forearms–ventures out into the
woebegone world to get a signal flare while Dad watches his every move through
a video-tracking system so inconsistent and convolutedly arrayed as to make The Hunger Games' set-up look lucid.
Cypher's warning about the locals primes us
for a kitschy missing-link showdown between Kitai and a less chatty Dr. Zaius,
but that scenario is worryingly short-lived. Shyamalan doesn't appear to have
gotten very far in mapping out the evolutionary leaps of our planet's present
inhabitants on the script's cocktail napkins. The revelation is that monkeys
now look CG and tigers can climb trees, which is nice but not arm-tablet nice.
The real BigBad is the Ursa, a giant cockroach with a pincer who's closer to
the Raige family (shades of Jaws:
The Revenge) than any primate. As with Signs, you can bet there's a family trauma in the recent past–justifying
an appearance by Kitai's big sister, played by fellow famous offspring Zoë
Kravitz–and a fortuitously idiotic way of banishing it.
Shyamalan has a penchant for slow-burn
suspense, and he flexes that muscle well enough in traumatic flashbacks that have the benefit of being rooted in domestic space, always his favourite
place to smash pretty things. Still, it's difficult to ratchet up tension with
material this unremittingly silly, and Shyamalan has no sense of how to pace
anything other than jump-scares. The glorified father-son camping trip is
credited to a story by the elder Smith, living out his push-pull fantasies of
total surveillance and then total emancipation of Jaden through the equivalent
of a two-hundred-million dollar adaptation of Patrick Stewart's script from
"Extras," punchline and all: "I've seen everything."
Whoever's credited, there's no story here, only marks to hit or fall short of; it's hard to sustain wonderment with science-fiction this shabbily
realized. Consider a moment that typifies the film's simultaneous arrogance and
incompetence at establishing its ground rules, as Cypher passes on the secret
to bagging an Ursa to his attention-starved son. "Fear," he explains, with the full weight of his authorial surrogate behind him, "causes us to
fear things that don't exist." Something for the "Cookbook," no
doubt (or a Scientology pamphlet), but what could that asinine circular
definition–which Smith delivers in the stultified cadence that's at least
justified as a faux-historical anachronism in The Village–possibly mean?
Grandiloquent nonsense aside, Shyamalan's
storytelling tropes are so pronounced that he is ripe for the kind of
retrospective appreciation the so-called vulgar auteurists have brought to
filmmakers like John McTiernan. Here again is an aloof father re-enchanted with
his children following a life-threatening crisis. Here again, too, is a forced
entry into a home, by a creature with a phallic pincer in place of Donnie
Wahlberg's firearm. Auteur or no, there's no
accounting for the sentimentalized misogyny that runs from at least Unbreakable to After Earth, rendering every wife either a depressive
shrew or a humble sacrifice at the altar of her husband's belated
self-realization. This time it's a sister who dies so that Kitai can become the
man he should have been all along, but those who don't walk out before the
final minutes will be greeted by one last jab at the Shyamalan-ian mother:
"I want to go work with Mom." It's woman's work, sure, just not as
intense. Or boring.
Great review. I have no interest in seeing these vacant-brained corporate spectacles anymore, but thanks to the writers of Film Freak Central I can revel in my (schaden)Freudian urge to wallow in witty accounts of their spectacular, money-burning failures to communicate.
Great review. I have no interest in seeing these vacant-brained corporate spectacles anymore, but thanks to the writers of Film Freak Central I can revel in my (schaden)Freudian urge to wallow in witty accounts of their spectacular, money-burning failures to communicate.
Great review. I have no interest in seeing these vacant-brained corporate spectacles anymore, but thanks to the writers of Film Freak Central I can revel in my (schaden)Freudian urge to wallow in witty accounts of their spectacular, money-burning failures to communicate.
So the new M. Night Shyamalan movie and a fictional Patrick Stewart script from “Extras” happen to share an incredibly common sentence in two completely different contexts. Um… sick burn? Leave the non-sequiturs to Chaw.
So the new M. Night Shyamalan movie and a fictional Patrick Stewart script from “Extras” happen to share an incredibly common sentence in two completely different contexts. Um… sick burn? Leave the non-sequiturs to Chaw.
So the new M. Night Shyamalan movie and a fictional Patrick Stewart script from “Extras” happen to share an incredibly common sentence in two completely different contexts. Um… sick burn? Leave the non-sequiturs to Chaw.
Mike: It’s not the sentence that’s shared but the fantasy of total surveillance, represented by Smith Sr. having the resources to remotely film whatever coverage of his son the plot requires. (When cameras fail him, Jaden’s suit dutifully reports his accelerated heart-rate, so Dad can “see” he’s lying.) The point is that a lavishly mounted project has a key concept in common with the low-rent joke script from “Extras.” I don’t see how it’s a non-sequitur to say so if the idea is that Shyamalan talks big but thinks small, just like the “Extras” version of Patrick Stewart.
Mike: It’s not the sentence that’s shared but the fantasy of total surveillance, represented by Smith Sr. having the resources to remotely film whatever coverage of his son the plot requires. (When cameras fail him, Jaden’s suit dutifully reports his accelerated heart-rate, so Dad can “see” he’s lying.) The point is that a lavishly mounted project has a key concept in common with the low-rent joke script from “Extras.” I don’t see how it’s a non-sequitur to say so if the idea is that Shyamalan talks big but thinks small, just like the “Extras” version of Patrick Stewart.
Mike: It’s not the sentence that’s shared but the fantasy of total surveillance, represented by Smith Sr. having the resources to remotely film whatever coverage of his son the plot requires. (When cameras fail him, Jaden’s suit dutifully reports his accelerated heart-rate, so Dad can “see” he’s lying.) The point is that a lavishly mounted project has a key concept in common with the low-rent joke script from “Extras.” I don’t see how it’s a non-sequitur to say so if the idea is that Shyamalan talks big but thinks small, just like the “Extras” version of Patrick Stewart.
Do us a favor, and look up the word ‘misogyny’. It does not mean what you think it means.
Do us a favor, and look up the word ‘misogyny’. It does not mean what you think it means.
Do us a favor, and look up the word ‘misogyny’. It does not mean what you think it means.
Obvious troll, is obvious.
Obvious troll, is obvious.
Obvious troll, is obvious.