It's a father-son tag team with Will and Jaden Smith taking the leads in M Night Shyamalan's upcoming scifi adventure
After Earth. Shyamalan, at this point, has long since burned through any residual goodwill left over from
The Sixth Sense and
Unbreakable while the Smith clan does not engender widespread confidence - for the record, I thought Jaden was perfectly fine in
The Karate Kid - but with the first proper trailer releasing in France we now get our chance to judge footage from the actual film rather than the people making it.
In After Earth, one thousand years after cataclysmic events forced
humanity's escape from Earth, Nova Prime has become mankind's new home.
Legendary General Cypher Raige (played by Will Smith) returns from an
extended tour of duty to his estranged family, ready to be a father to
his 13-year-old son, Kitai (played by Jaden Smith). When an asteroid
storm damages Cypher and Kitai's craft, they crash-land on a now
unfamiliar and dangerous Earth. As his father lies dying in the cockpit,
Kitai must trek across the hostile terrain to recover their rescue
beacon. His whole life, Kitai has wanted nothing more than to be a
soldier like his father. Today, he gets his chance.
Verdict? Better than expected, honestly. The visuals are fairly standard by this point - they do what you expect them to do and little more - but Shyamalan has always been a better than average technician so they're pretty enough. And the Smith duo look solid. Will seems to have put away his standard bag of camera mugging tricks and slipped into his dramatic mode while Jaden continues to develop the physical presence he showed in
The Karate Kid. Take a look below.