Buzz Aldrin Knew What M. Night Shyamlan’s After Earth Got Wrong
When Buzz Aldrin puts in his two cents about the realism of how space travel is portrayed in a movie, it’s worth at least 10 cents. And while nobody really needed an explanation of why M. Night Shyamalan’s After Earth wasn’t the most realistic movie out this year, it’s better than hearing a non-astronaut say it. (But seriously, read our review.)
Aldrin got a chance to see After Earth at its New York premiere and spoke with the Huffington Post at an event where he was a guest of honor.
Though he enjoyed the After Earth set design and the family dynamic between Will Smith and Jaden, he felt the film was too much of a “shoot-em-up,” joking that he would hope “the aliens are more peaceful than they are in this film, wherever they are.” But his main point of contention is one of the oldest errors in sci-fi: sounds in space.
“There was a lot of noise,” he said of After Earth. “In space, you don’t get that much noise…Noise doesn’t propagate in a vacuum. We talked over headsets. Fortunately, we were free of static. We could communicate with each other pretty clearly, and mission control, though we were 50,000 miles away.”
Should we just chalk another checkmark next to Joss Whedon’s name for offering complete silence in space on Firefly? I think we shall. Maybe if they’d have kept to After Earth‘s original pitch, this wouldn’t have been an issue and we wouldn’t have spent so much time talking about a damned Shyamalan movie.
After Earth problems aside, Aldrin is a proponent of colonizing other worlds, though he doubted it would happen in his lifetime. “And as Neil says, that was sort of a small step for man, but to me the giant leap is establishing permanence on another planet.” When we get there, you can bet something will be named after him.
Were there other things wrong with After Earth? Of course. The movie was fraught with issues almost across the board. Namely, the story was an issue and it didn’t help that it went through a transformation partly through the original writing process (it wasn’t even supposed to be a sci-fi movie).
So when Buzz Aldrin gets a little nitpicky with the problems in After Earth, it’s a bit like tossing a pebble into the solar system. Did viewers get sidetracked by the noise in space? Probably not when the rest of the overall movie just had a ton of problems.
