Fear Is A Choice

I finally watched After Earth a couple nights ago. It received pretty lousy reviews and I was expecting a big disappointment. It wasn’t the best movie I have seen but I enjoyed it. One quote stood out for me. It is about the nature of fear which is a strong central theme of the movie:

Cypher Raige: Fear is not real. The only place that fear can exist is in our thoughts of the future. It is a product of our imagination, causing us to fear things that do not at present and may not ever exist. That is near insanity Kitai. Do not misunderstand me, danger is very real, but fear is a choice. We are all telling ourselves a story and that day mine changed.

Will Smith’s character included this as part of his account to his son of how he came to understand the nature of fear and make new choices about it. If I remember correctly, this was about 50 minutes into the movie.

Regardless of the movie’s quality, there is a lot to be said for this quote and it is something which I think about fairly often.