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After Earth
In the future on a human-populated space colony, Nova Prime, the S'krell extraterrestrial race attempts to take it over with creatures called Ursas, which hunt by "sensing" fear despite being technically blind. Humanity created a peacekeeping military organization, The Ranger Corps, to fight the threat. Their leader, General Cypher Raige, defeats the Ursas with a fear-suppressing technique he called "ghosting". Cypher's daughter, Senshi, was killed during an Ursa assault. Blaming himself for his sister's death, Senshi's 14-year-old brother Kitai trains to become a Ranger like Cypher but is rejected.
Kitai's mother Faia convinces Cypher to take their son on his last mission before he retires. He takes The Ranger Corps off planet to train with a live Ursa, which is tied and immobilized in their spaceship. During flight, the ship is caught in an asteroid shower, causing them to crash-land on Earth, now a desolate and uninhabited planet which humans had evacuated a thousand years earlier due to an environmental cataclysm.
Cypher and Kitai survived the crash, but Cypher's legs are broken, and the main beacon for firing a distress signal is damaged. Cypher instructs Kitai to locate the tail section of the ship, which broke off on entry to the atmosphere. Inside is the backup beacon, which they can use to signal Nova Prime. Cypher gives Kitai his weaponized cutlass, a wrist communicator, and six capsules of a fluid that enhances oxygen intake so he can breathe. Kitai leaves to find the tail section, with Cypher guiding him through the communicator.
Kitai confronts many hazards; bitten by a paralytic leech after fleeing from a pack of baboon-like monkeys, he self-medicates but damages two of his capsules. After awakening, Kitai takes shelter just as the thermal shift arrives, where Cypher tells him a story about how he conceived "ghosting" to kill the Ursas.
Kitai reaches a cliffside waterfall, and Cypher learns about the broken capsules. Knowing that the only way to continue with two capsules would be to skydive, Cypher orders Kitai to abort the mission, but Kitai, believing that his father sees him as a disappointment, refuses to comply after blaming Cypher's absence at home for Senshi's death. Kitai disobeys Cypher's order and skydives down the waterfall but is captured by a large eagle, and his communicator is damaged. In the eagle's nest, Kitai fails to defend her chicks against large panthers before escaping to a river, where he drifts on a raft and a thermal shift nearly freezes him to death. The eagle, who had been following him, shelters Kitai, sacrificing her life.
Kitai reaches the tail section and learns that the ship's Ursa has escaped and killed the rest of the crew. He tries to activate the emergency beacon, but the atmosphere blocks the signal. He climbs up the volcano where he hopes the high altitude will help to activate the beacon, but he encountered the loose Ursa, and it attacks him. Kitai kills it using the "ghost" technique he learned from Cypher. After activating the beacon, he and Cypher are sent back to Nova Prime via a rescue team.