After Earth, thrashed by the US critics, turns out to be a very watchable movie, for an enjoyable evening out with your friends or family.

The sci-fi movie, starring Jaden Smith as the young warrior Kitai Raige, is played out as a father and son coming of age story with his real life father (Will Smith) as Kitai’s father, military hero and ultimate warrior Cypher Raige.

Unlike the last time this father and son worked together where the father went through a transformation (Pursuit of Happiness - 2006) this time the transformation is entirely with Jaden Smith’s character.

The movie follows a fairly predictable story line where Kitai has to take on a perilous journey to save his father and himself while coming to terms with demons from his past concerning the death of his sister.

The adventure takes place on Earth a millennium after the human race has left because of man’s destruction of the planet due to overuse of the planets resources, and though this set-up was ideal to make allegories about our present day’s political and environmental issues, writers Shyamalan, Gary Whitta and Will Smith obviously ignored this temptation.

The movie, shot digitally in Switzerland and the US, was the first project worked on by M. Night Shyamalan in the last twenty years that wasn’t based on a self-created screenplay.

Will Smith, who has wanted to work with Shyamalan for years, hired him to develop the overall look and feel of the film but it was Smith himself who coached Jaden and directed most of the action and how the story played out on screen.

Though neither of the Smith’s will get nominated for their acting ability in this movie, the characterizations of their roles was good enough for the movie to play out with no obvious stilted or cumbersome acting. Jaden, though, did get nominated for MTV’s (Seventeen Magazine’s sponsored) Bad A** teen award.

The movie though definitely needed a science consultant, which would have allowed easy fixes to some obvious faux paus.

First, the lush green temperate vegetation that Kitai has to travel through would not have survived with temperatures dropping to below zero every night and rising back to normal levels during the day.

Second the needle Kitai used to inject anti-toxin into his heart did not look long enough to actually reach his heart. And then there is Cypher’s (Will Smith) self-surgery to connect the two ends of an arterial break through two self-inflected holes in his thigh, which are just big enough for the plastic tubing he used to make the connection, really! And how may I ask did he connect the end of the tube to his ruptured artery.

Then there is the diving of the eagle chasing after Kita during his travels through ‘After Earth’, When birds dive they fold their wings in to reduce air resistance but this eagle dives with its wings out stretched and the final faux paus; the signal cannot get through because of atmospheric interference, so the answer is to climb to the top of an active volcano, spewing millions of ionic metal particles into the atmosphere, to get a better signal, really!?

In the whole scheme of the movie though most viewers would not have questioned this as attested by the whoops of joy at the action scenes from local cinemas and the tooting car horns at the drive-in. And truth be told I, like the rest of the Barbados audience, enjoyed this movie.

After Earth’s financial success though will be a hard fought battle, with an estimated production budget of US$130,000,000 and an US income (up to 9^th June) of US$54,516,057 but producer/co-writer Will Smith does not see this film as the end all and be all of this project, he envisions a multi-platform franchise including books, graphic novels and interactive video games which would be generated from the 300 page bible already developed (by Eisner Award-Winning comic writer Peter David alongside Michael Jan Friedman and Robert Greenberger) covering the history of mankind from their decision to leave earth right up to the events depicted in the film.