So you’ve got this relationship at the center of After Earth between celebrated hero Cypher and his son Kitai, played respectively by Will and Jaden Smith. It’s actually a rather sweetly conceived and mostly effectively executed story of a father having to watch his son venture through dangerous terrain while he is bound by injury and unable to protect him from the destructive forces he is sure to face. There’s some unavoidable clunkiness that comes with having a father instruct his son on things through a microphone, but that’s forgivable. Letting the action linger on Cypher’s impotence and Kitai’s quest to control his fear works fairly well.
But every time Will ordered Jaden to Tebow, I lost my mind a little bit. And this is while completely understanding the purpose within the story for this pose. He has to slow his heart rate and control his fear and calm the eff down for a second and yada yada yada. It’s just that yelling “take a knee!” at anyone contains so much absurdity that for just a second or two I feel like I’m watching a Will Ferrell farce. As though the next instruction to come out of dad’s mouth is going to be “hey now kid, you’ve got to keep your head on a swivel.” It’s something people say to draw laughs, but I’m fairly confident that that’s not the intention in the movie. It makes for a cool looking poster, but in the flow of the story, it throws an audience, at least for me and for the chuckling folks who were around me in the theater.
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