Kitai has failed, it seems, to advance to the next level in Ranger training, putting a damper on his reunion with Dad, who’s just returned from his latest mission.

In a bid to get this slow-moving story started with a bang, Shyamalan opens with the spaceship crash that eventually strands Kitai and Cypher on Earth, then flashes back 72 hours to pile on yet more backstory. (There is no simple explanation for anything in this movie.) In short: It’s a tough act for young Kitai to live up to. Making matters worse, Cypher is something like the George Patton of the Ranger Corps, storied for slaying ursas with his patented “ghosting” technique, in which he becomes invisible to the scent-guided creatures by suppressing his pheromone-generating fears. Some time before our story begins, one such ursa has made lunch out of Kitai’s older sister, Senshi (Zoe Isabella Kravitz), an incident that has driven an emotional wedge between Kitai and his father, Cypher (the elder Smith), each of whom on some level blames the other for the loss. The only problem: a hostile alien species that considers Nova Prime its birthright, and has spent most of the past thousand years trying to kill us with genetically engineered monsters known as ursas. Now, humankind has a new home planet, Nova Prime. Smith, who gave one of his best performances in the similar last-man-on-Earth vehicle “ I Am Legend,” here mostly takes a backseat to his 14-year-old son, Jaden, whose Kitai Raige (how’s that for a character name?) is a cadet in the United Ranger Corps, a militia formed a millennium ago when Earth was in the last stages of its man-made downfall (cue montage of floods, fires, riots). Night Shyamalan Goes Dark On “After Earth”Ĭlearly envisioned as a franchise starter for Smith and Sony, “After Earth” comes with a detailed press kit offering pages and pages of backstory fleshing out the film’s futuristic universe, little if any of it actually addressed in the pic itself (suggesting either long-range sequel plans or lots of carnage on the cutting-room floor).

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