Sony Music is pleased to announce the release of the original soundtrack, After Earth, directed by M.Night Shyamalan, featuring music written by Academy Award nominated film composer James Newton Howard and starring Will Smith and Jaden Smith. The movie opens nationwide on May 31, 2013. The soundtrack recording will be available on Tuesday, June 11 from Sony Music.
In After Earth, a crash landing leaves teenager Kitai Raige (Jaden Smith) and his legendary father Cypher (Will Smith) stranded on Earth 1,000 years after cataclysmic events forced humanity’s escape. With Cypher critically injured, Kitai must embark on a perilous journey to signal for help, facing uncharted terrain, evolved animal species that now rule the planet, and an unstoppable alien creature that escaped during the crash. Father and son must learn to work together and trust one another if they want any chance of returning home. Columbia Pictures presents an Overbrook Entertainment/Blinding Edge Pictures production directed by M. Night Shyamalan from a screenplay by Gary Whitta and M. Night Shyamalan and a story by Will Smith, and produced by Caleeb Pinkett, Jada Pinkett Smith & Will Smith, James Lassiter, and M. Night Shyamalan.
The score is by James Newton Howard, one of the most respected cinema composers in Hollywood. His early works include the scores for Pretty Woman (1990) and The Prince Of Tides (1991) with Barbra Streisand, which led to his first Academy Award® nomination. Howard has composed the music for more than 100 films and has been nominated for eight Academy Awards®. He’s won an Emmy Award, a Critic’s Choice Award and a Grammy® Award for Best Score Soundtrack Album for The Dark Knight (which he shared with Hans Zimmer). Well-known films on which Howard has worked include The Village (2004), King Kong (2005), Batman Begins (2005, with Hans Zimmer), I Am Legend (2007) and, more recently Green Lantern (2011), Snow White And The Huntsman (2012) and The Bourne Legacy (2012). Howard has scored all of M. Night Shyamalan’s films since their first collaboration on The Sixth Sense in 1999. His versatility as a composer is apparent in After Earth, which contains adventure and action scenes, along with moving passages in a family drama, and an atmospheric universe of primal sounds that drive home the meaning of humanity’s eviction from, and eventual return to, planet Earth.