Countless novels, video games and films set their scene in our world after some global catastrophe, and with good reason. The end of everything will remain a popular arena in which to tell your story and, in cinematic terms, as we are now knee deep in a world where CGpocalypes are ever more convincingly rendered there is cause to assume that we’ll see the world ending again and again.
After Earth is one of the latest armagedd-o-ramas to hit the big screen, conceived by Will Smith and snapped up by M. Night Shyamalan to direct, we are again treated to another cautionary tale of the consequences of our actions. That we will one day blast off from our homeworld and seek a new place among the stars is an age-old idea, in Shyamalan’s movie it is our short-sightedness which propelled us skywards. Pixar’s Wall-E shares some of the same ideas, albeit far more beautifully rendered in the Emeryville modern classic, and it is the turbulent mix of familiarity and decay which sets up an immediate and visceral tension.
Much of the after earth fiction places itself with the fate of the unlucky few to survive, others surround the desire to return, to recapture the home world. Elysium held the two in balance, After Earth continues this trend. In Shyamalan’s film we are walking like ghosts in our own flourishing graveyard.
Rather than deliver in painstaking detail the exact cause of our demise Shyamalan throws in a few perfunctory moments of stock footage of industrial waste along with a weary voiceover. Distancing us from the moment of catastrophe is a shrewd move, After Earth is far more concerned with the return than the sensational terror of the end of it all. Rather than the overgrown ruins of Washington in Logan’s Run or the rubbish strewn wastelands of Wall-E we have Jaden Smith emerging from the crashed spacecraft to thousand strong herds of elephant roaming over the verdant landscape while clouds of flocking birds swoop overhead. It is the paradise as he understands it to be, the Earth of Legend, a place worthy of the name Home.
As with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road the absence of explanation makes the apocalypse far more terrifying, and oddly more believable. There are no diseases let loose, no zombie hoards sprinting teeth-first into the few remaining pockets of humanity, there is nothing but the need to survive. This is about return, and as much of sci-fi mirrors contemporary concerns the cautionary tone of Wall-E is again invoked. The world is shown to be in ever more precarious states of decay, here though it flourishes without man.
As with 2013’s other Return to Earth movie, Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion, ideas from the sci-fi ether are at play in Shyamalan’s film. Like Oblivion, and Elysium, this is a survival film and it is our relationship with what we understand as ‘Home’ that is at the heart of this. The subsequent themes of legacy, paternal fear and growing pains are given a solid foundation on this other Earth and as with many of its genre forebears the search for meaning in the stars ends with a deeper calling, and a recognition that we are never far from home.
After Earth is out now on Blu-ray and DVD.
