Film Carew

“Do exactly as I tell you!” barks Will Smith, momentarily breaking from the monotone that defines his monotonous performance in the momentously tedious After Earth. The line lingers, as dutiful son Jaden Smith goes out on a far-flung-sci-fi-turned-retro-fantasy mission that's going to make him a man, even if he never cuts the apron-strings. Via faux-technical gimmickry too awful to get into (save this: “smart fabric” made me laugh out loud), Fresh Prince Jr remains forever tethered to his father, who watches over him with an omnipresence, commanding and controlling his actions.

It's, pretty simply, motion-picture functioning as video-game, with the main character being piloted through adventures like an on-screen avatar; the bits where he flies down a drop alongside a waterfall, scampers up a spouting volcano, or evades man-eating CGI monkeys(!) obviously sequences designed to be replayed - and playable - at home. Yet, it's hard not to think of the symbolism in papa Smith pulling the strings of puppet son, and the inescapable spectre of nepotism that wafts throughout this Smith family saga.

Based on a story idea by Big Willie Styles, After Earth is a ridiculous sci-fi flick in which military-fetishised soldiers seek to achieve a samurai-like level of calm in the face of death, which allows them to avoid the manhunting aliens who track their pray by the smell of fear (oh, and, yes: Alien and Predator references are plenty, and flimsy). This means that Smith spends most of the film talking in a mannered monotone that vaguely summons a robotic approximation of Chiwetel Ejiofor; submitting, perhaps for the first time in cinema's long and mangled history, a performance in which a real-life-human actor strives to be more like a CGI concoction. It's an awful turn, but only the second-worst one by a member of the Smith family herein; Jaden, playing a son desperate to please his dishwater-dull dad, offering more life/art ripples by wildly overcompensating for Big Willie's essentially-empty turn. He huffs, he puffs, he screeches like Edward Furlong in Terminator 2, he sticks out his wobbly bottom-lip, he emotes like this 8th-grade school play means everything to him. And he also talks in a mock-trans-Atlantic accent (of the future!) that comes and goes with the whimsy of the wind.

The pair are the only survivors of a crash-landing on a forbidden planet where everything has evolved to kill humans. And, ka-zoing! The forbidden planet is... Earth! Given that said planet is uninhabited by - and uninhabitable for - humans, this doesn't seem like the wisest evolutionary course for creatures actually looking to survive; in terms of dog-eat-dog Darwinism, far better to adapt to prey you may actually eat this millennia. I've never scanned the political credentials of M. Night Shyamalan, but the god-complex he displays in his films suggests someone leaning a lil' creationist; so, it's hardly a surprise that the rudiments of evolution are as beyond him here as they were in his mind-alteringly shitty The Happening.

Sadly, there's none of the wild crazy that has so marked Shyamalan's long run of filmic fiascos. After Earth is blessed with the prime elements of Night Cinema - the tin-eared dialogue, the po-faced delivery, the seemingly-autistic grasp of emotions - but the erratic, esoteric, cod-mystic airs have been squeezed out. This likely comes as a result of working with the market-tested, demographer-vetted, spreadsheet-centric Smith, who's basically a blander Tom Cruise by this point. “Fear is not real!” Big Daddy intones, playing a character who is so perfect he borders on machine; the film tapping into the essential dramatic inertia of making its star, Will Smith, play essentially the greatest human who's ever lived (“but sir, mass expansion is one in a million!” some soon-to-be-dead underling dares say aloud, when Smith divines the unlikely fate to soon befall their ship). It's hardly getting too mock-psychologist to suggest that that's how Smith sees himself, with all the self-actualised snake-oil he solemnly intones herein the things he says in the mirror each morning. Whether being a movie-star, slaying aliens, or selling door-to-door: success is a choice!

On beyond narcissism: the Smith-family relationship up there on screen - dad pushing son to Be His Best, son desperately wanting to be Just Like Dad - positively reeks of real life; a standard father/son trope amplified via voluminous egos and vast celebrity. If Jaden succeeds in the family business, and follows his father into the realm of Bankable Box-Office-draw, it services the grand ol' delusions of the patriarchy, where every success of the son is a reflection back on the father. And, so, on screen, playing out that dynamic, paterfamilias shows successor the ropes, but never hands over the keys; the hierarchy of the relationship never more obvious - and troubling - than when Jaden, on his heroic cross-country quest, manages to complete a task (or level, really), and pops praises him as if talking to his most obedient hound: “Good boy! Good boy!”

Mud is a Deep South coming-of-age story in which a 14-year-old urchin named Ellis (Tye Sheridan), born and raised on the muddy banks of the Mississippi, cycles through father-figures seeking answers for questions part sexual, part existential, hoping to find meaning in his bubbling biological urges. There's the titular hobo/outlaw (Matthew McConaughey) he's fixin' to help escape, who claims there's nothing truer than a heart in love. There's his disapproving dad (Ray McKinnon), mid-divorce, who tells him “you can't trust love”, hoping to spare his son the pain of his own broken heart. And then there's Michael Shannon's give-a-shit slacker, the uncle raising his best pal Neckbone (Jacob Lofland), who takes his romantic cues from Help Me Rhonda, and counsels the impressionable youngster that the best way to bounce back from a breakup is to go out and “get your tip wet”. This is the central theme of Jeff Nichols' kinda-disappointing follow-up to Taking Shelter: how tight should you hold to romance, and what's the damage that comes from delusion? It's about learning hard-knock lessons on life/love yet still keeping up hope; and, against that, a portrait of a faded rural life of subsistence-level divers dwelling in houseboats, selling their small catch locally. So, then, when Mud eventually becomes a very silly goodies-and-baddies tale involving big scary villains and shootouts and a body-count piled high, the film feels misjudged at best, kinda-horrendous at worst.