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.