When Kitai lies about how many oxygenated breathing capsules he has left (he’s broken some in a fall), Raige père makes him put his money where his mouth is and display the remaining capsules on screen. This paternal Panopticon, augmented by another camera on Kitai’s back and still more in the air, enables Cypher to observe every last detail of his son’s behavior. For most of his journey, the boy is accompanied virtually by his dad’s voice and face on his naviband, a device he wears on a cuff around his arm. These obstacles include super-predators who have evolved in ways dangerous to humans (a pack of slavering leopard-like hyenas, a bird of prey roughly the size of a jeep) an insectoid alien that can smell human fear and extreme weather conditions (for reasons not well explained, the Earth freezes over completely every night, so Kitai can survive only by locating geothermal pockets of warmth). The movie’s structure is as simple as a board game: Kitai must traverse a preselected path between their crash site and the tail, avoiding obstacles along the way. (Basically, this is the next-millennium equivalent of those safety flares your dad kept in the car trunk.) It’s up to the inexperienced but arrogant Kitai to make the 100-kilometer trek to the wreckage of the ship’s tail, where there’s a device that can send up an SOS signal to their home planet. Everyone but the two tough-as-nails Raiges is killed, and Cypher’s legs are both broken (“one of them very badly,” he informs his son, in a tone flinty enough to imply a compound fracture amounts to a minor hassle). The film’s vision of a ravaged post-human Earth is less a jumping-off point for speculation about our collective future than it is an excuse to strand the two main characters, the magnificently named General Cypher Raige (Will Smith) and his son Kitai (Jaden Smith) on an otherwise abandoned planet Earth, where the spaceship they were flying on a routine mission has been forced to make a crash landing. Really, After Earth is barely science fiction at all. That’s about as much detail as Shyamalan and his co-screenwriter, Gary Whitta, care to provide about the culture of the colonized planet on which their tale begins.
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