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After Earth

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I only recently saw AFTER EARTH, a big-budget movie from last year that went nowhere at the box office.


Rotten Tomatoes called it "a dull, ploddingly paced exercise in sci-fi."


It had some heavy-duty talent: Will Smith both produced and starred, Night Shyamalan directed. And it had an engaging premise: in some distant future the human race has abandoned Earth and the various creatures of the planet are now intensely hostile to humans, two of whom (father and son) nonetheless survive a crash-landing there and must somehow manage to get a distress beacon working while evading various monsters.


Will Smith is credited with the story idea. Shyamalan and Gary Whitta then apparently co-wrote a screenplay from that idea. Anna Rane and Hilary Momberger get credit as "script supervisors."


Personally I enjoyed it. But I'll only comment today on the Moby Dick theme. This ran throughout the movie. Almost the first words spoken are a father/son exchange on that novel.


"I'm reading Moby Dick."


"Your mother told me."


Later in flashbacks, we learn that the family has a history with that novel. The father (also a General of a military organization, the United Ranger Corps) had apparently recommended it years before to his daughter, since deceased, and flashbacks record their conversations about it, and about the girl's astonishment that humans could ever have hunted whales.


At movie's end, father and son are in a rescue craft that is flying them to safety, and the craft apparently passes over a bay in full sight of lots of now-unendangered and happily frolicking whales.


Presumably all this speaks to the ecological concerns that are fashionable in Hollywood movies. But I submit there is something else here. Moby Dick is made so much of because Will Smith's character is the anti-Ahab. Ahab brought himself and his crew to destruction through monomania. Smith is a kinder and more successful sort of authority figure, and though the Earth itself has become a sort of albino whale, Smith brings his son safely through danger and back home.

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