Brad Pitt finally did a popcorn movie with World War Z so his older kids could watch something of his - "please Mom not Tomb Raider 2 again"- together.
This bit of parental guidance came with a US$200 million price tag for a troubled shoot of a movie which largely abandoned its source material of Max Brooks' 2006 best-seller. Still, it's all worked out rather well. WWZ is a fast-paced oddly gore-free pandemic-disaster movie which spectacularly rewrites the rules of zombie-dom.
Meanwhile, Will Smith, no stranger to blockbusters, has been dragging kids to work for a while now. This time he's got his boy Jaden doing most of the heavy lifting in a father-and-son post-apocalyptic sci-fi thriller.
A thousand years into the future Smith and Smith - senior an interplanetary general, junior a space cadet - end up as sole survivors of a spaceship crash on Earth, the planet long abandoned by mankind and where the biosphere is now a health hazard.
From an idea by Pop Smith, After Earth is written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, after his awful The Last Airbender. This is yet another strike-out. At least he can partly blame his stars. The Smith double-act may be talkshow gold, but here, they are just leaden.
