Designated Hero: Cypher Raige, the father of Kitai, is supposed to be a compassionate leader. However, the story also shows him to be a cold, callous, unrepentant Jerkass and Abusive Dad who belittles Kitai and treats him like garbage. Two good examples are: the dinner scene, where Cypher shouts at Kitai with zero provocation, ordering him to sit down, when all Kitai did was ask to go to his room, and another scene where it's revealed Cypher blames his son for the death of his sister, even though it wasn't Kitai's fault and that there was no way he could have saved her from her death.
Fan-Preferred Cut Content: The original idea for the movie was a normal father and son on normal Earth. The father was injured while they were on a camping trip, so the son had to travel through the woods to get help while communicating with him via walkie-talkie. After the failure of the final product, a fair number of people have commented that they would have preferred this version due to a more simplistic direction for the story that does not concern itself with sci-fi elements.
Mis-blamed: M. Night Shyamalan ended up getting the brunt of the criticism for the film even though the film was really Will Smith's brainchild, though that's not to say Shyamalan is completely blameless for the film's execution.
The Scrappy: Both Cipher and Kitai Raige, due to their actors' chops not being up to par with any of their previous outings, as well as the fact that neither characters are particularly likable, the former for being a JerkassAbusive Dad and the latter for being Unintentionally Unsympathetic; it also doesn't help matters that they are the sole focus of all the action in the film.
Special Effects Failure: Some of the wildlife in the film stands out as obviously CGI, especially the sabretooth-inspired cats. In addition, much of the CGI has a strangely grainy quality to it that is very hard to ignore, and most of the scenes which are completely computer-generated look fairly primitive compared to contemporaneous (2013) standards. Part of the issue is that the film was shot in 4k resolution while the CG was only rendered in 2k.
Spiritual Successor: To Battlefield Earth — the slightly surreal sci-fi Happyology-themed vanity project of a big Hollywood star in which he plays a supporting major character, which was made with the intent of making a sequel which will never come.
The intro depicts humanity fighting with a powerful alien race over a declared homeworld, and that the fear-smelling aliens were only a monster the aliens sicced on humanity. Instead of focusing on what is a very important and hard-to-ignore part of the setting, the movie is about exploring a father-son relationship as the two struggle to survive in a hostile landscape, cut off from civilization. Ultimately, the plot is inconsequential to the setting.
Even though it's only been a thousand years, Jaden Smith never comes upon any ruins of modern Earth. He never finds anything that gives any indication that the planet is Earth. Other than the title and a line by Will Smith, the planet could be any fictional planet.
Given how infamous Shyamalan is for putting twists in his films, some people were expecting one in this film, with a popular idea being that Cypher was Dead All Along and Kitai was just hallucinating him to motivate himself. If this would have made the film more powerful or not is up to personal opinion, but it might not have been this dull.
With Will Smith, a usually charismatic guy on screen, visibly holding himself back to portray Cypher as cold and emotionless and Jaden, a newer, younger, less experienced, actor at the time, visibly struggling to act with any true emotion in his delivery (not helped by the made up accent), the fact that the writers or director didn't think to switch the characters' personalities to fit the actors better is weird. It could've made the film more watchable.
Visual Effects of Awesome: The Ursa is the most detailed creature in the movie, being rendered to the point of having a highly believable and very disturbing skin texture.
in the film.