Watching Jayden try to act is truly painful. Nepotism at its worst. Jayden and will in the same movie is the cinematic equivalent of black on black crime.

In the future, Earth becomes inhabitable and mankind moves to Nova Prime. However, aliens try to conquer Nova Prime but are defeated by the Rangers under the command of General Cypher Raige (Will Smith). The aliens bring the predator Ursas to hunt down the humans attracted by their fear and Raige develops the fearless ghosting technique to defeat them.

On the same day that Raige returns home, his estranged son Kitai Raige (Jaden Smith) is not advanced to the Ranger position in the academy. Raige promises his wife that he will travel in his last assignment before retirement and she convinces him to bring Kitai with him. When their spacecraft is damaged by an asteroid storm, she crashes on Earth and only Raige and Kitai survive. Raige breaks both legs and Kitai needs to cross the hostile and dangerous planet to retrieve the beacon and save their lives.

"After Earth" is an awful movie, beginning with the boring story and the lame screenplay. It is laughable that in a society possessing advanced technology, the spacecraft beacon is not automatically activated but needs human action to send a distress signal. The decadent M. Night Shyamalan is the director of one good movie ("The Sixth Sense") only and nothing else is worthwhile in his work despite the available budget. Will Smith is a charismatic actor and most of his movies are entertaining but he is dreadful in this movie.

But the greatest problem with "After Earth" is the non-talented son of Will Smith, Jaden Smith. He is a ham actor, with his wooden face, terrible pronunciation of the sentences and ugly crying face and ruins the movie in the lead role, in a poor attempt of his father to promote his career of actor. Like mentioned in Mr. Michael Elliott's review, "After Earth" worth watching just so you can say you saw the worst child actor in history. My vote is one (awful).

Title (Brazil): "Depois da Terra" ("After Earth")

The outpouring of hatred over this movie makes no sense. This week I had the opportunity to see four of the current big movies in the theatre and this was by far the best of them. The same petty arguments are being made by people that claim this is awful. Jaden Smith, M. Night, and even Will Smith. So I went in with very low expectations...I mean the film has a 4.7 rating right now which is atrocious. So thank you all for the meagre expectations because I thought the film was great. Not amazing, not life changing but great. Then again I have disagreed with the masses on an M. Night film before. I thought Lady In The Water was superbly brilliant. Then again this is also the guy that made The Happening, easily one of the worst films I've ever seen. Still I found this film to be entertaining, decently acted, very good special effects and a generally well made, well produced film. M. Night really is a brilliant story teller, we've seen it before with his successful movies (and in my opinion his less than successful ones.) Whether he hits or misses he tries very hard and I saw the fantastic imagination that went into this movie.

Will Smith has always been THEE personified movie star. Nearly every film he made was a huge hit. The guy has an undeniable incredible charisma and yes he has a big ego but somehow it works for him. In this film he is almost a supporting actor. He spends nearly the entire film laid up and on a com headset. Still he brings a certain intensity to the role and is certainly believable as a man who has learnt to eliminate fear. I'm nearly as sick about hearing how much people hate Jaden Smith as I am about people hating Justin Bieber. I don't understand the hatred for the kid. Yes he has an ego, just like his Dad but I think he's reasonably talented, he is still pretty young to really know if he has the acting chops that his Dad has. I thought he actually did a great job in this film. He didn't show the ego that he tends to have in person and him and his Dad worked very well together. Both roles were solid and carried the film just right. Jaden was a full on action/sci-fi hero and it worked and was believable and bravo to him for that.

Somewhere along the line M. Night Shyamalan became a joke and that's unfortunate. I don't really fully understand why he became such a joke. I mean, he has made a few stinkers...one horrendous stinker (The Happening) but he has also made some amazing films. I wouldn't put this into his amazing movies but I wouldn't put it anywhere near his stinkers. This was a great, entertaining, emotionally charged sci-fi flick and I enjoyed every minute of it. I admit I was caught into the M. Night hoopla and expected a twist ending but this one is just a straight forward mainstream adventure flick. One of the final scenes between father and son was near brilliant and almost brought tears to my eyes. The special effects were very well done and some of the monsters and beasts they created were epic in stature and should be looked at as being fun and well done. I guess I just don't understand the expectations people had from this. It seems that people have a real grudge against young entertainers like Jaden Smith but I am not one of them and I encourage you if you love sci-fi to watch this and simply enjoy it. 8/10