The script also fails to explain why future warriors, whose technology allows for a “cutlass” whose two ends morph into any type of blade the user requires, choose not to use guns or lasers against the mighty Ursa. What we don’t learn in the too-quick intro is how all humankind came to speak in the same accent, most reminiscent perhaps of New Zealand’s - one that suits none of the cast very well, and makes Jaden Smith’s voiceover hard to follow. Harnessing this “ghosting” technique, he became a hero in the still-raging war. When a member of the United Ranger Corps, the elder Smith’s Cypher Raige, found himself able to suppress his fear, he was suddenly invisible to the monsters. (By whom? Buy the comic book, kid.) Those beasts, Ursa, are blind, but can smell the pheromones humans release when afraid. We learn that, having ruined our environment, humans decamped en masse to Nova Prime, which would have been a nice place if not for the monsters that had been bred to kill humans.

They must be saving an awful lot for comic-book and videogame spinoffs, though, as the film squeezes its millennium-long setup into a few short moments of voiceover introduction. Plans for such a franchise seem to be afoot, with filmmakers reportedly having written “1,000 years of back story” for these two characters and their society. Will Smith’s presence, not just as co-star but as originator of the story, seems likely to carry box office receipts beyond the benchmark of Shyamalan’s previous picture, the wretched “The Last Airbender,” but those hoping for a franchise should navigate elsewhere. The disappointingly generic film, which strands a father and son (Will and Jaden Smith) on Earth a thousand years after a planet-wide evacuation, will leave genre audiences pining for the more Terra-centric conceits of “Oblivion,” not to mention countless other future-set films that find novelty in making familiar surroundings threatening. Night Shyamalan’s sci-fi survival tale whose shipwreck action could (with the exception of a scene where our hero scrawls a crude map over Lascaux-like cave paintings) take place on any old life-supporting globe in the cosmos. Humanity’s home planet hardly merits the name-check in “After Earth,” M.

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