This movie has far too little going for it!
This is basically a very shallow movie experience, that never turns into a fun, exciting or tense movie to watch. Not that it's too formulaic or anything but it's doing far too little with its main concept, which is the biggest disappointment about this movie.
Once the movie gets started, it makes you think that it's going to turn into a father/son relationship type of story, in which the two, slightly estranged persons, slowly start to grow toward each other and reconnect, once they spend some more time together and have to face some dangerous situations. However, as it turned out, the movie is hardly focusing on the two together or their relationship, as the movie its story slowly keeps moving along. Emotionally this is a very flat movie, while there obviously were plenty of opportunities and paths this movie could have taken with its story its characters. It instead decides to do absolutely nothing with anything and it rather lets things play out in a very bland and disengaging way.
This all still would have been OK, as long as the movie had some other decent enough things to offer. Something interesting or something exciting or specular, that keeps you glued to your seat. I just don't know what this movie was trying to do or hoping to achieve though. Seems to me that no one was really trying to turn this into a great, original and memorable movie to watch. It's not that anything about this movie is truly awful but it just feels like a very uncreative and lifeless attempt at trying to combine science- fiction with adventure and dramatic elements.
Kind of funny to see how once M. Night Shyamalan's name proudly was put on every poster and he and his name showed up everywhere, once a new movie by him got released. With this movie, his name is hardly mentioned anywhere! How times have changed, in just the course of a couple of of years and a few terrible movies later. Guess that good news for the M. Night Shyamalan haters out there is that his hand is nowhere to be seen in this movie really. Nothing about this movie screams M. Night Shyamalan to you, which should tell you something about its blandness as well.Visually, it's also nothing more but a just passable enough looking movie. The special effects certainly weren't bad but they most definitely weren't all that great either and the same could be said about the set design. This definitely at no times ever feels or looks like a big budget science-fiction movie, even though its budget apparently was somewhere around $130 million. You would and should expect to get some more excitement and creativity out of a movie, for that kind of money!
And I don't know. I don't think that Jaden Smith is a terrible actor but it's very obvious that the only reason why he is in the business and gets to do movies like this is because he has some well known and respected Hollywood parents. There's certainly nothing about him that seems terribly charismatic and also nothing about his performance indicates that he's one among the most talented young actors in the industry. And that's kind of annoying and distracting about him and his performance in this movie. It also doesn't help that he stars alongside his real life father Will Smith in this, which makes it all the more apparent to you that the only reason why he's in this movie is because of his father. Bad move from all sides!
Really, there is nothing about this movie that makes me hate it but it's a terribly unremarkable one, without any true excitement, creativity, emotions or originality in it.
5/10
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