With a voice-over very reminiscent of Admiral Pike talking trash about Captain Kirk in the new Star Trek Into Darkness trailer, it seems like Jaden Smith is just too reckless for his own good. Luckily, father/son post-apocalyptic bonding is here to save the day! Watch the latest trailer for M. Night Shyamalan’s After Earth.
reCaptcha Error: grecaptcha is not defined
Wow, an SF film that’s actually all about the relationship between an estranged father and son. I haven’t seen one of those in a while!
And military father to estranged son. With lots of military stuff. And sirs and tight lips and stern looks. And courage and strength and bravery and all that. Haven’t seen any of those lately, either.
Do stern military mothers ever deal with their estranged sons? Do non-military, uncertain, hesitant fathers ever get to teach their estranged childen to bake cookies? And what about those estranged daughters? Do they get to crash-land on alien planets and climb mountains and do stuff, too? Who knows?
Does every fucking science fiction film have to be a male wet-dream video game fantasy anymore? I suppose so.
I realize my femininity ought to feel very alienated by this, but my blackness is pleased as punch about the father son bonding and the being portrayed as respectable job-having and the main-character-and-not-sidekick-to-a-white-dude being, and the non “large scary black man” TVTrope embodying, and the not being all about oppression and other forms of misery, and the geared toward a mainstream audience-ness…granted the Smith dynasty and Denzel are the only ones we can usually rely on for this with any regularity, but it’s something. Hopefully Shyamalan won’t wreck it, or fill it up with the requisite hip hop soundtrack, which is the only music that can be associated with black folk at all ever at any time, apparently… And if they manage to avoid menacing or frightening white women in any way I might just keel over…
Give us a chance to catch up, please? Grazi. ;-)
*I am not anti hip hop. I am anti how all other genres seem to evaporate out of existence when I show up.
@Maac, I love you!
Maac@3: Well said, and apologies for my blind spot.
Do stern military mothers ever deal with their estranged sons? Do
non-military, uncertain, hesitant fathers ever get to teach their
estranged childen to bake cookies? And what about those estranged
daughters? Do they get to crash-land on alien planets and climb
mountains and do stuff, too? Who knows?
Oh, the estranged daughters get to land on alien planets from time to time: see, for example, Prometheus, which had two of them! (Admittedly, one was only estranged on account of her father being dead).
Estranged mothers, OTOH, tend not to happen. Where as it’s very difficult to be a father and not be estranged.
Brave is built around a damaged mother/daugther relationship. Of course it is only SF in the broadest sense, but still such movies do exist.
Who the hell wants to read or watch scifi/fantasy media about uncertain, hesitant fathers engaged in mundane, anti-heroic activities with their children?
There’s a reason stories about initiation, triumph over adversity, and reconcilation are so popular. There’s a reason why they’re so familiar. These mythological patterns reflect something about humanity (or at least Western culture). If they didn’t resonate, they wouldn’t propogate, so rather than deride the familiarity of the story, why not try and explore why these themes keep recurring?
I’ll give you a hand, check out “The Heroic with a Thousand Faces” by Joseph Campbell :)