There are certain taboo subjects that polite social society hates to address. Politics is one, especially in light of our modern desire to divide completely along ideological and electoral lines. Enter a party spouting the latest liberal nonsense or equally offensive Tea Party talking points and you’re bound to face a fierce rebuff. Religion is another hesitant topic, though the reasons are slightly less unilateral. Everyone assumes a belief in God (or a one way trip ‘down below’ for those that don’t), it’s just how they choose to believe, and what they do in said Higher Power’s name, that causes commotion. For some, all Muslims are violent fundamentalists. For others, Christians have just as many insane skeletons in their closed confessionals.

While it still has a chance to recoup its budget (and reputation) in the always unfathomable foreign film market, Will Smith’s latest, the abysmal After Earth, appears poised to be the first certified bomb of the 2013 Summer season. Raking in a dismal $27.2 million at the box office opening weekend, the savaged sci-fi epic is seen as another nail in the coffin of Smith’s once dominant commercial appeal, and the final one in M. Night Shyamalan’s struggles to regain his more or less DOA cred. While one critic complained that the film was like watching a child, ill-prepared for carrying a movie on his diminutive shoulders, actually do so, the real problem here is the plot. No, not the Point A to Point B path toward a rescue beacon, but the laughable speculative fiction that fills in the fringe.

For many horror fans, the found footage film was born, and quickly died, with the highly influential and often imitated Blair Witch Project. While those who followed failed to realize the real genius behind the Internet/indie smash (that is, that the actors had NO idea what was going on and were reacting, realistically, to the unusual circumstances they were thrown into), they did like the visual design of seeing everything through a first person, POV camera lens. As a result, dozens of determined filmmakers have used the style to skip such important motion picture particulars as character, narrative, or outright scares to put their version of the supernatural onscreen. Apparently, a narrowing field of vision and the possibility of something suddenly straying into your visual frame of reference is a viable substitute for suspense.

With its flash and power chord panache, rock and roll has always been ripe for cinematic exploration. From the fictional stories based in the medium to the concert films that find emotional epiphanies in the strangest of song couplets, music makes for memorable movies. There is just something universally unreal about someone—or group of someones—who can transform mere words and arranged notes into an anthem, a ballad, or the soundtrack of your life. Even more amazing are the backstories involved. Some of these people are barely passable as human. Instead, they are a surreal combination of person and performance, their onstage act meshed with this doubts and disconnects of their everyday existence to form that most mighty of myths: the rock god.

How do you go from “the next Spielberg” to a critical joke in the span of a single decade? How, exactly, do you squander all the cinematic goodwill you’ve built up over the course of some stellar motion pictures to produce what many consider to be back-to-back-to-back bombs? It’s an intriguing set of questions, one that the subject would probably scoff at as nothing more than the irrational ‘hating’ of a fetishized fanboy nation.  But the fact remains that M Night Shyamalan is considered the owner of one aesthetic flop after another. While The Last Airbender made enough money to see Paramount past its obvious critical drubbing (it was based on a wildly popular animated kids show, after all), what’s clear is that said film, and the nearly three films in between his latest, After Earth, showcases a director no longer in control of his muse.