Marcel Winatschek

After Earth

People right now want apocalypse stories. Zombies, asteroids, aliens—doesn’t matter the flavor. There’s always another angle on civilization collapsing. The genre never exhausts itself because there’s always a version of the end nobody’s quite tried.

M. Night Shyamalan made one called After Earth with Will Smith and his son Jaden. They crash-land on Earth, only Earth’s been empty for centuries. Humans are gone. Engineered predators run the planet. You land on your home world and it’s completely hostile.

Will Smith fighting mutant creatures with his actual kid. The casting’s weird—Smith’s the action guy, the improviser, the one who survives. Here he’s just a father trying to keep his son alive against things that evolved to kill humans. It shouldn’t work but it does.

I mostly just wanted to see that. Smith fighting for survival on a dead world. The father-son thing is just the frame for that one image. A familiar face in the most hostile version of home. That’s the whole movie.