Image via Will Smith and Jaden Smith in After Earth By Anthony Crislip Published Sep 29, 2026, 12:05 AM EDT Anthony Crislip has always loved movies and television, and has been published in outlets such as SlashFilm and Ultimate Classic Rock. While working as a film programmer or judge at a film festival, he has striven to develop interest in underseen films. He is a particular fan of digging deep into forgotten corners of film history. Sign in to your Collider account Add Us Like Like follow Follow followed Followed Listen Thread Log in Here is a fact-based summary of the story contents: Try something different: Show me the facts Explain it like I’m 5 Give me a lighthearted recap With his 2013 film After Earth , M. Night Shyamalan was a director working miles outside of his strengths. Shyamalan’s best work up to that point (and even after) tended to be small-scale and intimate, with light supernatural touches deepening and complicating the characters’ journeys, as well as thrilling camerawork that evoked the best of Alfred Hitchcock and Steven Spielberg . The more fantastical his movies got, the more his storytelling weaknesses and crutches became insurmountable, and no amount of inventive filmmaking could get viewers to overlook it. By 2013, he had made so many movies in that mode that his reputation — kickstarted by the world-shifting success of 1999’s The Sixth Sense — had suffered, leaving him with one option: a junky, post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie with Will Smith .
The movie was a bizarre vehicle for Smith and his son Jaden Smith , playing a father and son duo once again following the schmaltzy rags-to-riches classic The Pursuit of Happyness . Focused on two humans millennia in the future who have crash-landed on an abandoned planet Earth, After Earth is an ironic inversion on Smith’s breakthrough roles in Men in Black and Independence Day — this time, he ’s the alien, and Earth is deeply unwelcoming. Smith famously conceived the story himself, according to The Wrap, developing the conceit of a father and son on a camping trip gone awry, with the son having to push himself to the limit to save both himself and his distant, dying father. The sci-fi angle came soon after, and Shyamalan was hired by Smith shortly after the release of his 2010 film The Last Airbender .
Mind-bending and literally out-of-this-world.
Jaden Smith and Will Smith in After Earth Image via Columbia Pictures After Earth opens with rapid-fire (and inexplicably accented) narration from Kitai (Jaden Smith), explaining the basic details: humanity destroyed Earth through a variety of climate disasters, fled to a colony called Nova Prime, and are under constant attack by alien creatures called Ursas, who can smell humans by their fear. Cypher (Will Smith) has no fear, which has given him an intimidating reputation. While Shyamalan has been critically knocked for his awkward, monotone direction of actors before, the collaboration with Will Smith here is especially galling, taking one of the most charismatic movie stars of the 1990s ( as well as the co-lead of one of its most fun movies ) and turning him into an unfeeling military man. And yet, After Earth carries on a Shyamalan tradition, following the tense relationship between estranged fathers and children, with unspoken pain slowly revealed over the course of the movie.
In that way, at least, After Earth feels like it’s of a piece with other Shyamalan movies like Signs and Unbreakable . Those movies had a sen…