After Earth merits comparison with 2000’s Battlefield Earth, John Travolta’s godawful film tribute to the sci-fi novel by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. Yes, it’s that bad.

The tag line reads: ‘Danger is real, Fear is a choice.’ Little do the unsuspecting viewers know that it is, in fact, a warning about the film itself, for one needs courage to sit through this post-apocalyptic action fare.

There are menacing moments and the editing is taut but this stays in cliche territory; it’s nothing you haven’t seen before. The film suffers from a lack of ambition. After Earth aims for interstellar overdrive but barely manages to take off.

The background score and cinematography are impressive but dialogues are cringe-worthy and sound like rejected drafts from a Paul Coelho book. After Earth looks like a Smith family portrait that’s gone horribly wrong.

It is neither a spectacular mainstream adventure nor the genre-bender experiment you would expect from Shyamalan. Maybe, M. Night should forget boys who fight baboons and go back to boys who see dead people.

Despite being far from M. Night Shyamalan’s best work, After Earth is by far one of the better films he has directed.

Unless you need some pedagogical pointers from superstar daddy Will Smith on bringing up a whiny, bratty kid (Jaden Smith), this is yet another disappointing outing from M Night Shyamalan.