Night Shyamalan’s After Earth opened with a highly disappointing $9.8 million – including $1 million from Thursday evening and midnight screenings – at 3,401 North American theaters on Friday, according to studio estimates found at Box Office Mojo. Spaceship crash, alien monsters, parental peril.Starring Will Smith and his son, Jaden Smith, M. “After Earth” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). These days, apparently nothing less than a big-screen vanity project will do for Junior. Once upon a time, Hollywood parents gave their children sports cars as gifts. It’s a calamitously one-note, unpersuasive performance that’s a match to that of Jaden, a pretty teenager with jumpy eyebrows whose character remains an insufferable brat.
An often affable screen presence, he spends much of the movie in a chair on the spaceship pursing his lips and watering his eyes. Smith and his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, are producers on “After Earth,” which suggests that there was no one on the production who could really say no to him. Those images are few and far between in a movie that loses its way long before Kitai reaches the belching volcano that leads to his inevitable destiny. But here and there he also offers up an image - as with a close-up of Kitai’s face dusted with glistening snowflakes - that rises out of the torpor.
Shyamalan generally torpedoes his movies with overweening self-seriousness.
For the most part it is an uninteresting slog alleviated only by the occasional unintended laugh and moments of visual beauty. There, they trade bitter words, clench their jaws and hold back the tears amid long pauses and inert action scenes, most involving Kitai racing through the dense woods and confronting digitally rendered animals. The story kicks in slowly, beat by predictable beat, after a debris storm downs Kitai and Cypher’s spaceship and they fall to Earth in a smashup that looks like someone decorated the set with wet toilet paper and plastic wrap. There’s even a nod to “ Moby-Dick” shortly before Cypher and Kitai’s spaceship crashes to Earth, throwing them together for the usual and less-so life lessons like: “Root yourself in this present moment.
Night Shyamalan, who wrote the script with Gary Whitta (“ The Book of Eli”) from a story by Mr. It’s a nautical motif that winds though the movie, which was directed by M. In this case, the back story goes, after ruining Earth, humans relocated to Nova Prime, where they wear a lot of white and decorate their homes with flowing sailcloths. These shrieking creatures are introduced in one of those opening expositional heaves that filmmakers use to sketch in the who, what, when, where and why, oh why. Daddy Dearest has risen having honed tremendous self-control and a useful protective technique, “ghosting,” which renders him invisible to the monsters plaguing human civilization: the nonbearlike Ursa. It’s a bummer because all he wants to do is please his father (Will Smith, Jaden’s father), a heroic if unfortunately named general, Cypher. A father-son encounter session tricked out with science-fiction clichés and steeped in motivational uplift, “After Earth” opens with a teenager, Kitai Raige (Jaden Smith), washing out from some kind of ranger academy.