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This 2013 Will Smith Sci-Fi Film Is One of M. Night Shyamalan's Most Underrated Movies

M. Night Shyamalan’s post-apocalyptic sci-fi thriller is better than you might remember.

By Benjamin Bullard
Cypher Raige (Will Smith) frowns in a headquarters in After Earth (2013).

More than 10 years after its 2013 release, After Earth (streaming on Peacock here) still rates as one of the most expensive movies M. Night Shyamalan ever directed. Starring Will Smith and his then-14-year-old son Jaden as a father and son juggling a ton of family baggage while stranded on some future version of our long-depopulated planet, Shyamalan’s big-budget sci-fi spectacle cost $130 million to make, while returning a comparatively modest $243 million at the global box office. 

Critics mostly decried the movie, citing clumsy dialogue and a perceived lack of animated vivacity between its two famous stars — an understandable lament, since After Earth arrived only a year after Smith had just turned in one of his typically gonzo comedic performances opposite Josh Brolin in Men in Black 3 (streaming on Peacock here). Watching After Earth these days , it’s tough to say the reviewers totally got it wrong… but what a lot of them might’ve missed is the sheer creative audacity that suffuses nearly every frame of After Earth and its wholly original science fiction world. 

After Earth: Will & Jaden Smith's sci-fi spectacle that (mostly) still holds up

Then as now, there’s no denying that After Earth is an amazing film to look at. Shot on location on opposite U.S. coasts as well as in the tropical wilderness of Costa Rica, the movie sprung from an idea Smith had to make a father-son film about survival in the rough — initially without any of After Earth’s science fiction genre trappings. 

Veteran writer Gary Whitta (The Book of Eli, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story) spun Smith’s idea to suit the movie’s eventual post-catastrophe futuristic setting, framing the relationship between Will’s character (Cypher Raige, a human military general who’s slow to show his soft side) and Jaden's (Kitai Raige, an eager-to-please son who lives in his father’s shadow) as a starkly-worded, almost stoic emotional standoff. 

In concept, that’s definitely a cool setup: Kitai slowly breaks free from his father’s militaristic and overbearing grip after the two crash-land — with a human-hunting monster in tow — on an Earth that’s long since reverted to a primordial and unpeopled state. With Cypher injured and immobile, it’s up to Kitai to take a long solo walk across the planet’s deadly terrain, aided only by his father’s video link (and a super-cool space spear), to retrieve and activate a lifesaving rescue beacon. 

Aside from some past family drama that’s mostly told through flashbacks, that’s all you really need to know in order to get into After Earth’s small and unassuming plot. In this post-MCU age of save-the-world science fiction, it’s a less ambitious genre story than we’ve perhaps become accustomed to, but these days, that doesn’t seem like such a bad thing. In a movie universe where all the sci-fi stars were perfectly aligned, there ought to be room not only for films that dare to rescue the entire galaxy, but also for the occasional simple space flick about a father and son who grow closer through adversity. 

The world-building of M. Night Shyamalan's After Earth

Kitai Raige (Jaden Smith) frowns with clouds behind him in After Earth (2013).

Where After Earth truly shines, though, is in its world building and screen-friendly set design. The film wasn’t sprung from any existing entertainment IP, but instead forged, from concept to completion, out of its creators’ original ideas. You’ve got to give props to a movie that’s audacious enough to concoct a new science fiction place completely from thin air, and to then flesh it out with a pretty well-conceived and consistent lore-verse of ships, cool landscapes, fearsome creatures, neat-o futuristic tech gizmos, and vast and visionary planetary vistas. 

It might sound counterintuitive, but After Earth’s home-run visuals contrast nicely against the movie’s far less epic and intimate human story — even if Smiths Sr. and Jr. do leave a lot of their signature acting panache somewhere just offscreen. The world of genre movies could genuinely use more keenly-focused smaller sci-fi premises like this one, and as a bonus benefit, the film’s tight focus on its two main characters lets it establish some pretty solid, easy-to-grasp ground rules that get viewers rapidly up to speed about what will or won’t work within its nicely-realized story-verse. 

In a film catalog as broad as Shyamalan’s, there’s definitely a bona fide dud or two (we’re looking hardest at you, The Happening.) But even with its flaws, After Earth isn’t one of them — and after seeing it again, you might just feel a pang of regret that the movie’s underwhelming box office all but banished any hope that it might’ve served as the launching pad for a larger science fiction IP (and the recent viral takeoff of this fan-made “sequel” trailer will let you know, at least, that you’re not alone). 

But like 2012’s much-maligned John Carter, After Earth is one of those sci-fi movies whose franchise potential is maybe a little too stifled not by any single point of failure amid its grab bag of promising ideas, but by a box office too impatient (and efficient) to afford any chance at a better second outing. More than a decade after its crash-landing in theaters, it’s still a fun (and visually spectacular) watch — and you can stream it on Peacock here.