Feels good to go into this movie with pretty neutral expectations and come back out with certainty. Certainty that this is in no way a bad movie, despite what is popularly claimed. It's not even an average movie.

I'm torn on what to rate this, though, because I would've liked more from the beginning and ending portions of After Earth. I'm somewhere between 3.5/5 and 4/5. I feel like we're missing some connecting tissue in the early and end portions while the rhythm of the film is most natural during the middle. That's everything that happens once the focus is only on the shipwrecked father and son up until the last 20 minutes or so. Fortunately, that means the majority of the story works out well.

Primarily acts as a coming-of-age adventure movie, the kind that would fit naturally into a young adult sci-fi novel series. Interesting to me is the strong focus on the natural world, not conquered by the son so much as encountered, which is a notable deviation from how these kinds of stories typically are presented in Hollywood. His technology helps him survive in general, but at times it's the natural world itself that saves him where his gadgets and training fall short. In a similar way, the son also encounters himself, both as a personal construct (his fears and self-image) and as he truly is (his intuition and inner nature).

There's also a contrast between learned discipline (which can also be thought of as imitation of the actions and thinking of others) and intuition via connection with the present moment. Part of what allows the son to meet the challenge of the planet is his capacity to relinquish what he thinks in favor of what he feels and achieve a new harmony with himself. Nicely enough, this is paralleled by his physical trials: he moves from conflict with the natural world around him toward gradual integration. He neither conquers nor is subsumed, he adapts and harmonizes.

I've been jumping around in Shyamalan's directing timeline, but it's interesting to observe his shift toward increasingly Eastern spiritual ideas over time. Some of his earlier films show more explicit influence from his time attending a Roman Catholic school while young. But as he puts more distance between himself and those experiences, the influence of Eastern thought surfaces more and more in his creative work. Although Shyamalan grew up in a Hindu family, I think it's Daoism (or at least similar ideas) that seem most present in the Eastern influences here.