Apart from the questions about how much Scientologist dogma has been sneaked into After Earth, another reason to be leery of the film has emerged: its metanarrative.
The film (which I probably won't be seeing in any event, unless I happen to chance across it while scanning channels) isn't really about Scientology. The real story is how it came to be, a story of the rich growing richer and making sure the money stays in the family. Literally.
I first came across this in Aisha Harris's Slate piece about what she found off-putting about the upcoming film (I won't go into detail about it; you can watch the trailer if your interest is insufficiently piqued). After going over a number of film pairings of fathers and their children that have paid off on screen (often due to real tensions between the two, as in On Golden Pond and Wall Street), she gets to the Will Smith-Jaden Smith pairing and what she doesn't like about it: its crassness.
But the father doesn’t just watch: He’s heavily involved in his child’s decision-making. And the entire project was conceived as a family project that could make Jaden a star. As Chris Orr explains, the movie was
produced by Smith, his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, brother-in-law Caleeb Pinkett, and longtime friend and business partner James Lassiter. And it’s based on a story written by Smith as a vehicle for his son, a story that he conceived while he and his brother-in-law were watching television together.
Anyone who’s been paying attention to the Will-Jaden publicity machine that’s been churning for the last month or so knows that After Earth is meant to be the latter’s launching pad into a career they hope will ultimately mirror the former’s in terms of success ... While Jaden appears eager to follow in his father’s footsteps, he doesn’t seem fully ready. Acting-wise, certainly, he’s got a long way to go. And Jaden doesn’t want to be “just” an actor: He wants to be another Will Smith, a future box-office champion, and transparently so. With a reported budget of $130 million, a release date right in the middle of the summer season, and Will’s box-office legacy looming large, the sci-fi movie is being set up as a blockbuster carried by a novice talent. (It’s Jaden’s name, not Will’s, that is listed first in the closing credits.) This business partnership between father and son thespians feels unlike anything we’ve seen in Hollywood before—and it’s not a pretty sight.
Later, I was reading
The Onion, where someone was apparently thinking the same thing. And, given where they were writing, they chose to frame their thoughts as satire: writing
a piece, purportedly by Jaden, that gets more directly (and viciously) at what, specifically, Harris found so "off-putting."
When I was first presented with the opportunity to act alongside my father in our latest movie After Earth, I couldn’t have been more excited. It seemed like a surefire hit at the time—I mean, wouldn’t the movie-going public just be over the moon to once again see Will and Jaden Smith on the silver screen playing father and son?
But now that I actually take a step back and really think about it, I’m starting to wonder if maybe—and I could very well be overthinking this, so bear with me here—the gimmick of my dad and I starring in the same film is actually more obnoxious than appealing. And maybe not just obnoxious, but super obnoxious. Downright repellent, actually ...
I can’t help but think that maybe, somewhere along the line, when my wealthy, A-list celebrity parents began developing projects solely as vehicles to build my career and make the Smith family hundreds of millions of dollars richer than it already was, the concept of my father using his clout to shoehorn me into co-starring film roles might possibly have started rubbing people the wrong way. I can certainly see, for instance, how my dad contriving a $130-million Hollywood science-fiction film in an attempt to promote me to his level of fame and fortune could maybe come across as a tad self-serving.
In fact, maybe—just maybe—people might view the movie as less of a great film starring an actor they love and his lovable son, and more of a soulless vanity project. Or go so far as to say such blatant nepotism and hunger for fame is the biggest problem in Hollywood today, and in the United States of America as a whole.
... when I take a step back and really think about it, I guess there are maybe one or two things that my family does that could put off the general public. Like my parents completely manufacturing a singing career for my younger sister Willow, for example. Or my musical collaboration with Justin Bieber to promote my last film, The Karate Kid. In fact, one might say that my entire friendship with Justin Bieber, and the image of two very rich, very entitled teenagers hanging out until six in the morning may in fact hurt my overall image, as opposed to enhancing it.
Come to think of it, I suppose it is entirely possible that there are a few moviegoers out there right now who are saying something along the lines of, “Actually, this whole movie seems really cold, calculated, and designed purely to raise the media profile of the film’s millionaire movie star and his young, precociously famous son" ...
Hell, one could even conceivably argue that my parents are doing me a huge disservice by giving me a career that I didn’t necessarily earn myself, creating a wave of ill will toward me that will be more or less impossible to shed for the rest of my life ...
But hey, at the end of the day, I’m rich, I’m famous, I’ll soon be getting my own house, and my newest movie will probably make millions of dollars at the box office this weekend. So who gives a fuck what you people think?
Who said Occupy was dead?