• 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.

  • Peter Travers
    Peter Travers
    Rolling Stones India

    2

    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 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.

  • Ishan Raychaudhuri
    Ishan Raychaudhuri
    The Sunday Indian

    6

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.