Reel Entropy

After Earth is taking a lot of crap for being made by M. Night Shyamalan and the Scientologist church, but when the baggage is laid down, the movie is fantastic.

The film stars Will and Jaden Smith as Cypher and Kitai Raige. Cypher is a high-ranking general in a neo-military organization that Kitai has just failed to join because, despite book smarts, he collapses in the field. At their wife/mother’s (Sophie Okonedo) insistence, the emotionally distant duo go on vacation, but crash land on Earth, now a poisoned wreck of a planet. Cypher’s legs are broken, and to get rescue, Kitai must journey through 100 kilometers of wilderness and overcome his fear of active duty.

Complicating matters is the ship’s third survivor — an ursa, a blind, arachnoid behemoth that was genetically engineered by an alien race to kill humans. Ursas track their prey by pheromones produced in fear. The primary defense against them is to completely purge oneself of fear, a technique Cypher invented, but Kitai cannot master.

After Earth  is a thematic triumph. Fear and guilt are thoroughly examined through the main characters’ experiences, and the simplistic directing and powerful performances allow the audience to sympathize completely. As a character examination, After Earth couldn’t aspire to be anything more.

The Smiths are fantastic, with Jaden turning in the most subtle performance of his career. The stilted, awkward aesthetic between son and distant father makes dialogue a non-option for expressing emotions, but at no point does Jaden have trouble expressing the posttraumatic anxiety that defines his character.

Writer/director M. Night Shyamalan validates the marketing tactic of not mentioning him ever by taking himself out of the film. His stylistic quirks are minimized, to the point that he doesn’t have a cameo or a twist ending.

The film isn’t perfect. It needs more ambition. Because Kitai and Cypher don’t communicate, their back story is primarily told through flashbacks, and more flashbacks would have been better.

I would have really liked to see Kitai collapsing in his field training. While the informed trait is supported by his difficulties in the main body of the movie, it would help to see how bad his panic attacks were in a controlled environment.

There’s also a bit of a bait-and-switch going on. While guilt takes a big role, the green aesop the commercials promised lacks bite, particularly because of the biggest monster not being from Earth at all. The film would have been better and cleaner had it abandoned Earth as a setting.

A lot of noise has been made about Scientology themes in the film, with its main message coming straight from L. Ron Hubbard’s teachings and its climactic setting, a volcano, being important to the religion. If an audience goes in expecting to see propaganda, confirmation bias could easily ruin the movie. It happens, but in this case, it’s really sad. After Earth is strong in all the ways it needs to be, and a few motifs to an alternative religion shouldn’t change that.

I have to wonder though — what happened to firearms?

Joshua Knopp is a formerly professional film critic, licensed massage therapist, journalism and film student at the University of North Texas and a staff writer for the NT Daily. He is going to be 21 forever, baby. For questions, rebuttals and further guidance about cinema, you can reach him at reelentropy@gmail.com. At this point, I’d like to remind you that you shouldn’t actually go to movies and form your own opinions. That’s what I’m here for. Be sure to come back next week for a review of The Purge.

J.J. Abrams crushed it with his first Star Trek movie, but a big reason why was the fact that he didn’t remake a story that had already been told. However, in Star Trek Into Darkness, he___ ______________ ______________ ______.

New Jim Kirk (Chris Pine) returns to defend the Earth (still not boldly going anywhere just yet) and Starfleet against John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch), who is blowing things up because director/producer Abrams wanted to allude to real-world terrorism. The rest of the New cast returns as young, sexy versions of the original Star Trek cast along with Alice Eve as New Carol Marcus.

The first 20 minutes of the film are just awful, but it picks up quickly from there. A cold opening featuring the Enterprise saving a primitive civilization from a volcano that would apparently destroy their entire planet gets Kirk demoted and Spock (Zachary Quinto) reassigned, but before either of them report to their new assignments they are reunited as captain and first officer on the Enterprise and sent after a terrorist hiding on the Klingon homeworld, Kronos. These sequences are boring and serve only to lengthen the film and add constant, masturbatory references to Star Trek and Wrath of Khan.

It also sets a context into the film of Kirk growing into a leadership role, which is redundant because that’s exactly what the previous movie was about. Into Darkness attempts to recapture its predecessors’ brilliance by recreating plotlines, and that’s very much the wrong way to go about it.

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After his run as Spiderman, hasn’t everyone learned Tobey Maguire can’t really narrate?

As Nick Carroway in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, that’s basically all he does. Carroway chronicles his summer in New York with the titular Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio). Gatsby throws giant parties all the time, which would lead to a fun summer were it not for his obsession with Carroway’s married cousin, Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan).

Gatsby falls deeply into a common trap for adaptations in that it tries to celebrate its source material rather than recreate and adapt it. The resultant product always has the same problem — it doesn’t do a very good job of actually telling the story. Audiences who know the story will likely love it, but those who don’t will leave the arena scratching their heads.

The Great Gatsby actually presents a big headache for prospective adaptors. With less than 200 pages, the book says a great deal without much bulk. It’s what makes great writing, but the best writing often doesn’t translate to screenplays at all.

In this film, it’s obvious when Carroway’s lines are being stretched to include iconic quotes that were only narrated in the book, when dialogue that the book glossed over is being recreated word-for-word without being fleshed out and when important moments are being stretched out because Luhrmann wanted to add pop music over them.

The stretching is another big pitfall the film trips over. It pulls 143 minutes out of a 182-page book, which is kind of ridiculous even without the knowledge that the book is narration-heavy. This movie is long, and it feels long.

The movie isn’t without artistic merit. The soundtrack is melodic and haunting, and the set designs are wonderful. They both go a long way in creating an aesthetic that fits the story like a glove. Audiences who come just for Luhrmann’s reputation in these aspects won’t be disappointed.

But with a focus on these elements, the overall film suffers. There are multiple points in which the movie grinds to a complete halt while the audience is invited to simply admire the sets for a few minutes. When a movie literally tries to move its background into the foreground, something’s gone wrong.

Joshua Knopp is a formerly professional film critic, licensed massage therapist, journalism and film student at the University of North Texas and a staff writer for the NT Daily. He was previously unaware of the concept of “preemptive amputations,” but is pretty sure they have more to do with cowardice than courage . For questions, rebuttals and further guidance about cinema, you can reach him at reelentropy@gmail.com. At this point, I’d like to remind you that you shouldn’t actually go to movies and form your own opinions. That’s what I’m here for. Be sure to come back next week for a review of Star Trek Into Darkness.

Iron Man 3 is really fun and awesome, but can’t escape its own lack of importance.

The movie picks up with Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) where The Avengers dropped him off — suffering acute anxiety attacks after a near-life experience. Stark is called to action after The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) takes responsibility for a series of explosions, one of which catches Stark’s old bodyguard, Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau). In other news, Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall) and Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) develop the extremis virus, and after a radical plot twist this becomes important.

This plot twist is the first thing that jumps out about Iron Man 3 — the violent plot twists. It’s difficult to examine them without spoiling them entirely, but suffice it to say the antagonists aren’t as advertised, even if you’re familiar with the Extremis storyline on which the film is based.

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Pain & Gain has the words “Michael Bay” in the opening credits, but after those words fade out, the film becomes unlike anything Bay’s ever directed.

Based on a true story, the movie follows Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg) and the Sun Gym Gang, a real-life group of gym trainers who kidnapped, mutilated and extorted wealthy members of their Miami community in the mid ’90s. In the film, he recruits Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie) and Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson) to help him kidnap Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub) and force him to sign over all his assets. Lugo and Doorbal are real-life criminals who currently sit on death row for this and much more, while Doyle is a composite of three other gang members. Kershaw is fictionalized and has his name changed.

Pain & Gain has taken some heat for making real-life criminals into sympathetic characters, but that’s actually the exact opposite of what the film does.

Pain & Gain is a rebuttal on gangster movies of the ’70s and ’80s, which do romanticize violent crime. Lugo mentions Michael Corleone and Tony Montana (Main characters of The Godfather and Scarface) as his inspiration — people who took what was theirs, regardless of the legality. Lugo argues this is the essence of some perverted version of the American Dream — he’s worked hard, therefore he deserves Shalhoub’s money.

He further rationalizes that Shalhoub, who owns a Schlotzkey’s and made his fortune through business exchanges, is a jerk and therefore doesn’t deserve what he’s earned.

The hypocrisy makes the film. Lugo, like the movies he’s mimicking, confuses being a man and living the American Dream with beating other people up and taking their things, despite the fact that it is Shalhoub who has realized the dream.

Pain & Gain is bathed in American themes and perverse movie references, the latter of which are usually used to justify something horrible. The flag noticeably hovers over Lugo as he asks for a second chance early in the movie. Acutely typical motivational speaker Johnny Wu (Ken Jeong) helps set Lugo on his journey. The bodybuilding surroundings and steroid use highlight a perverse focus on muscle mass as a measure of masculinity. Detective Ed DuBois (Ed Harris) expressly dismisses Lugo’s actions as “un-American.”

The script, penned by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, further alienates the gang members with a strange, multiple narration structure. The audience hears directly from all parties, which makes it even clearer the film doesn’t want the gang seen as role models.

Bay abandons splatter-gore horror and explosion-based action for a more thoughtful movie than he’s ever made. His dull token female is, regrettably, still there, but so is his ability to make movies fun, if nothing else. His next movie, The Purge, looks to continue the thoughtful streak.

Joshua Knopp is a formerly professional film critic, licensed massage therapist, journalism and film student at the University of North Texas and a staff writer for the NT Daily. He totally doesn’t have a problem with the gangster movies of the 70’s and 80’s. For questions, rebuttals and further guidance about cinema, you can reach him at reelentropy@gmail.com. At this point, I’d like to remind you that you shouldn’t actually go to movies and form your own opinions. That’s what I’m here for. Be sure to come back next week for a review of Iron Man 3.