“… So shut it, hatas.”

– Signed, the Pinkett-Smith Family, M. Night Shyamalan, and Justin Bieber

There are films that fail because of shoddy production, lazy film making, and a general pandering lack of cohesive creative vision. Films that don’t try, that don’t care, that have nothing but obvious, greedy contempt for their audiences.

And then there are films like After Earth that sport a special kind of insidious awfulness. Films that, like trust-fund kids in the best private pre-schools, are raised with most every financial and creative advantage. That are well-lit, well-filmed, well-edited. That look so pretty and dazzling. That try so hard. That try too hard. The result is like a tuxedoed Gerard Depardieu at an open bar: a handsome, well-groomed mess constantly on the verge of wetting itself.

On its shiny, self-important surface, After Earth is not inept. It’s not sloppily made. (Aside from being so dumb at every plot turn that I’m guessing most of its production budget went for edible paste and plastic scissors.) And yet it ends up so shallowly pretentious, you can’t decide if you want to slap the movie for being stupid or punch it in the nose for being smug.

Will Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith have two children. One of them, Jaden, starred in the very nicely-done 2010 Karate Kid remake. The younger one, Willow, has pursued a singing career that involves whipping her hair around in public. Like any parent, Will Smith loves his kids and wants to make them happy, not just by buying them ponies and dirt bikes, but producing giant, expensive science-fiction movies for them to star in. So he came up with the sci-fi story idea for After Earth, about a future father (Will, of course) and son (Jaden, of course) who bond over life-threatening, character-building adventures and lots of CGI landscapes and creatures.

Sony Pictures/Columbia, Will Smith’s home-base studio for the past 15 years, likes to keep Will Smith happy, so over the years they’ve enabled/greenlit his personal passion/prestige projects (like Ali, The Pursuit of Happyness, and Seven Pounds) as long as he keeps making Men in Black movies for them. So Sony says, “Will, we love your sci-fi, father-son, life-lessons story! Who do you want to direct it?”

Enter M. Night Shyamalan, a maker of film thrillers who, during the heady days of the late ‘90s, was a bit hyperbolically referred to as the “new Spielberg.” But by 2010, Shyamalan’s one-time Sixth Sense wunderkind reputation was on pretty was on shaky ground: Natural Hollywood Law says no film maker should be able to survive making both The Happening and The Last Airbender—throw in Lady in the Water, and it’s only by the grace of God or the Fresh Prince that Shyamalan isn’t helming Asylum direct-to-video knockoffs like World War Y or Sharksquito.

As we are informed at the start by the de rigor lumpy chunk of post-apocalyptic backstory, After Earth takes place in the future, on a future planet where future humans have fled after environmentally borking the Earth. However, the future planet is plagued by massive future creatures called Ursas (Latin for “Future Space Bears”): blind, killer monsters that hunt by the smell of fear pheromones and were sent by mean aliens to eradicate the pestilent future humans. (Sort of like when Australia imported a bunch of cane toads to eat crop-destroying insects.) We never see or learn much about the mean aliens or their motives, but having seen what the future humans did to Earth, is it so shocking the aliens wanted the filthy little buggers outta their back yard?

Future Will Smith is a Space Ranger who’s good at fighting the Ursas because a) he is able to “ghost,” to remove all fear and become invisible to them; and b) he’s a ram-rod, hoo-hah, space military type who clearly craps out space piles bigger than some blind, fear-sniffing alien whatsit. Despite the fact that Smith’s character seems about as warm and emotive as space-gun rack, he’s managed to find a future wife and impregnate her and create a teenage son (Jaden Pinkett-Smith); the former wants him to retire, the later wants to Impress His Old Man.

They all wear future clothes, have a future living room and a future kitchen, and eat with future chopsticks. (They’re made of clear future-plastic space Lucite!) In fact, the film’s entire design teeters between interesting and silly: Space ships and living quarters have a textured mix of fancy shiny and low-tech bamboo, adobe, and hemp that could be seen as either “a neo-organic hybrid” or “we ran out of money to finish the sets.”

During a routine trip to another planet, a future space ship carrying the Elder and Younger Smiths and a captive Ursa (which they were taking to another planet for “ghosting” training, or just to poke with sticks) crashes on a planet that turns out to be Old Earth, now all “Keep-Out!” quarantined because the air is un-breathable and all the fauna has grown into bigger, badder future species, “evolved to kill humans.”

Dad conveniently breaks both his legs in the crash landing, and so Son must set out on his own across the verdant-but-hostile Mean Earth landscape to reach the broken off tail section of their ship and find a new rescue signal doo-hickey. Along the way, Smith the Younger is pursued by hyper aggressive Mean Earth wildlife and the now-loose Ursa. Naturally, he picks up both life lessons and giant poisonous leeches.

The cinematic creative process is tricky enough to navigate and manage as it is, but to do it with an international mega-star, his wife, and kid across the table? When your own marquee value has taken a vicious pantsing in recent years? So you’ve got a once-proud, even arrogant film maker now trapped in cinematic serfdom to a still-proud, even arrogant super star who “has a fantastic idea for a sci-fi movie” starring his kid.

There’s also an odd, detached sterility to the “humans” characters in After Earth, like they’re all overly conscious of being in a “science fiction” movie—it makes David Lynch’s Dune feel like a Cassavettes film.

It doesn’t help matters that the film is thick and sluggish with clumsy, self-important exposition: When characters say things like “Instruments show we’ve entered an asteroid storm,” they sound like someone who just realized they said that out loud.

In addition to the past week’s blood-in-the-water critical and media pile-on of After Earth, there’s been a lot space-slings and astro-arrows flung at Jaden Pinkett-Smith, in part out of a natural Schadenfreude-y reaction to such obvious nepotism, in part because he’s really mouth-breathingly bad in the film. But to be fair, I can’t imagine many actors, let alone younger ones, thriving under Shaymalan’s weird tonal choices when directing human actors.

I don’t know if young Smith-Pinkett will ever be a great actor—it doesn’t seem likely he’ll ever knuckle down and do the hard-knocks work necessary—but he shows plenty of screen-holding magnetism in The Karate Kid, so it’s more likely a matter of hooking up with directors in the future who know how to play up his charms.

At a generous best, we could chalk up all this lumpy, stilted tone to some sort of misguided homage on the part of Smith and Shyamalan to the imaginative-but-fussy-and-formal sci-fi prose of ‘50s masters like Bradbury, Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov, but there’s no other indication After Earth was aiming for any sort of subtle retro-camp. Instead, the stiff tone permeates all the performances with an earnest dopiness that does nothing to help mask the aforementioned absurdities.

Aside from the earnest mawkishness of all this life-lesson learning (and Scientology-inspired aphorisms like “Danger is real, fear is a choice”), After Earth is yet another kick in the astro-teeth to fans of real science fiction. In the screenplay by Shaymalan and Gary Whitta (writer of the equally future-dunderheaded Book of Eli), based on the Elder Smith’s story, much of the baffling “science” attached to the fictions seems to belong to a new field of study called “BWSSS”: “Because Will Smith Says So.”

Ideally, After Earth would be better off with a little flashing sign in the corner of the screen that says “BWSSS” whenever a howling scientific plot point pops up:

Over hundreds of years, why haven’t humans found a more effective way, via chemicals or clothing, to mask their “smell of fear” from the Ursas rather than just “ghosting” (which we’re told very few can do)? BWSSS.
How have Earth’s species—including killer baboons, leeches, lions, and condors–evolved to “kill humans” when there were no humans around? BWSSS.
How can there be daily overnight killing frosts on Earth, and yet the lush, thick flora springs back up green every morning? BWSSS.

We can assume that having originated the project, Will Smith brought his fair share of dumb ideas to the table, but tonally and cinematically the blame has to fall on Shyamalan. He’s always been a rather arch, hermetic director, seemingly enraptured with the notion of Twilight Zone/Outer Limits-style storytelling, and more so with the very nature of storytelling itself.

As his films have increasingly missed their marks, Shyamalan seems to have retreated further into his sealed-off Movie World, each creative failure driving him deeper into his Big Book of Cinematic Structure. He appears locked by ego and a healthy persecution complex (“No one gets my deep, meaningful film fables!”) into a myopia that no longer lets him see what is and isn’t working anymore in his movies.

Every line of dialog sags with plot notes or exposition—one wonders if Shyamalan has heard a real, non-Hollywood, non-movie-screen human being speak in 15 years. Every scene loudly telegraphs a later narrative pay off, as quest objectives and obstacles are neatly snapped into place one after another like giant Screenwriting Legos. The result—with its ginned-up plot points; perfectly curved character arcs; and spelled-out story beats—feels like a screenwriting seminar, not an adventure film.