M. Night Shyamalan’s Major Sci-Fi Action Flop Deserves a Second Look on Streaming

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.