After Earth: Film Review

Humanity's home planet hardly merits the name-check in After Earth, M. Night Shyamalan's sci-fi survival tale whose shipwreck action could (with the exception of a scene where our hero scrawls a crude map over Lascaux-like cave paintings) take place on any old life-supporting globe in the cosmos. The disappointingly generic film, which strands a father and son (Will and Jaden Smith) on Earth a thousand years after a planet-wide evacuation, will leave genre audiences pining for the more Terra-centric conceits of Oblivion, not to mention countless other future-set films that find novelty in making familiar surroundings threatening. Will Smith's presence, not just as costar but as originator of the story, seems likely to carry box office receipts beyond the benchmark of Shyamalan's previous picture, the wretched The Last Airbender, but those hoping for a franchise should navigate elsewhere.