After Earth

Directed by M. Night Shyamalan

(PG-13)

*

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Hollywood has its first major bomb of the summer, and “it’s landed right on Will Smith,” said Joe Neumaier in the New York Daily News. The normally reliable star is paying at the box office for his ill-considered attempt to create a sci-fi project for his 14-year-old son: After Earth is not only “a crashing bore”; it has saddled the elder Smith with his worst opening at the box office in fully 20 years. Playing a general from the future who’s trapped in a wrecked spaceship on an Earth that’s been taken over by alien monsters, Smith utters his lines so stiffly, it’s “as if he’s some kind of otherworldly being himself,” said Richard Roeper in the Chicago Sun-Times. That leaves Jaden Smith to venture forth on a potential rescue mission, and he’s simply not talented enough to carry a movie, especially one made without the slightest “wit or sparkle.” Only three action sequences interrupt the tedium of this awkward coming-of-age tale, said Claudia Puig in USA Today. The rest is tendentious dialogue delivered in an odd future dialect—one that “approximates how Elmer Fudd might have spoken as a toddler.”