In the future, humans will ruin the Earth so much that we have to abandon it and set up shop on new worlds. We’ll find out we’re not alone and have to fight alien bugs that sense our fear, but by controlling our emotions though a form of mental discipline called “ghosting,” we’re able to fight them. And, for some reason, we’ll all speak with bizarre accents that make us sound like we’re from Shakespeare, Alabama.
Rampant nepotism isn’t After Earth’s worst crime against cinema. In fact, there’s something understandably appealing about having two generations of Smiths on screen together. However, the Smiths show none of the liveliness they’re known for, because it’s demanded of them to employ the school of acting that says everyone in the future is more robotic by nature. Fault for that, I think, falls on director M. Night Shyamalan, who exercises his Serial Killer Earth instincts to the Nth degree, evolving from the killer winds of The Happening to the entire freakin’ planet in After Earth. Hopefully the twist ending in Shyamalan’s career is that he learns to make compelling cinema again.