Letterboxd — Your life in film

After Earth is getting such awful reviews? I mean, did you guys SEE The Last Airbender? With your eyes?! It's 901903 times worse than anything even IN after earth. Sure, it's not amazing and I'd have preferred a slightly less predictable ending, but it was entertaining enough.

Jaden Smith wasn't y'know, good, but Will did everything how he should; the film is -about- being emotionally inert, the acting is real... Being wooden is a choice oh god abort this review I can't believe I said that I'm out sorry so so sorry

To all the people worried about a Joss Whedon film in which he had no control of the dialogue: you know who wrote the words right? You do know that Shakespeare is the fuckin' master of quipping.

After all, let it be known, she did call me Ass.

There are good qualities here, the visuals are often nice, a few great performances are littered throughout, and some of the thematic ideas are phenomenal (my personal favourite, Superman's powers as a kid used as a metaphor for learning difficulties/autism).

However, the core is simply appalling. It fails on every level for basic story flow, character motivation and involving film making. Scenes just come in a random order, characters just do things and never feel like real people, and because you can never get invested in the characters, every single moment falls flat.

It's a shame, because people will blame this on being a "brooding" superman movie, which I feel COULD work really well, not realising the problems run deep into the basic building blocks of how to create good drama.

I want to articulate how much I hate 21 but I fear I posses neither the vocabulary, stamina or time left on this planet.

It's that bad.

The Last Boy Scout is, in some ways, the ultimate made-by-committee action film. There isn't a single shred of originality in the buddy cop premise, in the villains, in the characters, in the total and utter misogyny bleeding from every pore of this movie.

So why is it four stars if it's unoriginal and morally repugnant? Because damn does it know it.

Awareness of what a trashy piece of exploitation you are, combined with a script as tight as a drum, can make all the difference, and here it does. It's not afraid to embrace it's seedy story of awful people doing awful things, making awful jokes with some awful big explosions -- it never lies to you with a false sense of importance or poignancy, ultimately leaving you with a a film wearing exploitation film influence on the sleeve, rather than trying to apologise for and hide it.

After all, this is the 90s... (Yada yada, seriously if you don't know the end of that sentence then why are you even on a movie website?)

All in all, I think I handled the truth pretty well.

Not as good as I had been lead to believe, but enough funniness and intrigue to keep me mildly interested.

I think I love this film more and more each time I watch it. Masterful pacing and tension.

That thing they do with the credits: excellent.