If the least one expects of the 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still is that it merely ful­fill the promise of its title, then please move right along, for the earth stands still only a few moments. It is, how­ever, a far big­ger pro­duc­tion than the 1951 orig­i­nal directed by Robert Wise (read The Dork Report review), even account­ing for the infla­tion of film­mak­ing tech­nol­ogy and audi­ence expec­ta­tion for spec­ta­cle. As if to over­com­pen­sate for the original’s now admit­tedly amus­ing implau­si­bil­i­ties and the silly giant robot and fly­ing saucer, it tries too hard to impress with too many uncon­nected ideas and exces­sive hus­tle and bus­tle. It’s even rather inap­pro­pri­ately macho, with more uncon­vinc­ing dig­i­tal heli­copters and mil­i­tary hard­ware than a typ­i­cal Michael Bay movie. At least it’s much, much bet­ter than the dis­as­trous Inva­sion (the third offi­cial remake of The Inva­sion of the Bodysnatchers).

It does get off to a good start with a pro­logue in which a lone moun­tain climber (Keanu Reeves) dis­cov­ers a glow­ing orb in 1928 India. The sequence is mys­te­ri­ous and inter­est­ing, but ulti­mately unim­por­tant to the plot. We later learn that the orb was an alien probe that copied the climber’s DNA, from which to grow a sur­ro­gate body for the alien Klaatu (Reeves again) decades later. Even the most basic plau­si­bil­ity is vio­lated as humans dis­sect his alien body with­out bio­suits or any kind of quar­an­tine at all. One won­ders if ear­lier drafts of the screen­play involved Klaatu’s cap­tors ini­tially misiden­ti­fy­ing him as a miss­ing per­son from 1928. A missed oppor­tu­nity would be a scene in which the aged orig­i­nal adven­turer comes face-to-face with an alien mim­ic­k­ing his youth­ful self. But as it stands, this whole sub­plot acts as a dis­trac­tion. The orig­i­nal movie sim­ply pre­sented the alien as humanoid (if a lit­tle unusu­ally tall and angu­lar) and that was enough. The notion of a alien being reborn in a new body is inter­est­ing but an unnec­es­sary com­pli­ca­tion, one that only raises ques­tions unre­lated to the cen­tral themes. Klaatu is lucky his tem­plate was the hand­some Reeves (at one point, he steals a schlumpy guy’s suit and it fits as if it were tai­lored for him). Sup­pos­edly this body is human, but he exerts super­pow­ers includ­ing the trans­mu­ta­tion of elec­tric­ity into some kind of sketchily-described life force. In this respect, the orig­i­nal is bet­ter; Klaatu out­wardly looks like us, period, end of story. Isn’t that enough? Another extra­ne­ous idea, super­flu­ous to the core story: Klaatu’s giant omnipo­tent robot com­pan­ion Gort is now com­prised of a swarm of nanobots. Why have both a giant robot and itsy-bitsy nanobots? Pick one idea and run with it.

Keanu Reeves in The Day the Earth Stood Still

But we’re get­ting ahead of our­selves; first we must ful­fill another genre cliché. The Day the Earth Stood Still lines up after the likes of The Hap­pen­ing, The Day After Tomor­row, A.I.: Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, Deep Impact, Watch­men, and Clover­field (the list goes on, and on…) to take another stab at dec­i­mat­ing poor New York City. When human­ity detects an uniden­ti­fied object set to strike Man­hat­tan, Dr. Michael Grainer (Man Men’s Jon Hamm) assem­bles a crack team of diverse experts includ­ing astro­bi­ol­o­gist Helen Ben­son (Jen­nifer Con­nelly) to fly around in black heli­copters and gawp help­lessly at all the spe­cial effects. Luck­ily, for the moment at least, the object turns about to be a space­craft. In 1951, alien emis­sary Klaatu (Michael Ren­nie) went to Wash­ing­ton like Mr. Smith. In 2008, this Klaatu fig­ures the place to make a grand entrance is Manhattan’s Cen­tral Park (never mind that the United Nations head­quar­ters is on the East Side). Fans of computer-generated destruc­tion of the sort in which Roland Emmerich traf­fics will be pleased to see Cen­tral Park forcibly land­scaped before the movie is over. Dur­ing the final cli­max in the Park, I’m pretty sure the prin­ci­pals hide under the exact same bridge as the sur­vivors at the end of Cloverfield.

Like the orig­i­nal, it’s cred­ited as being based on the 1940 short story “Farewell to the Mas­ter” by Harry Bates. Its cin­e­matic touch­stones include The Brother From Another Planet and The Man Who Fell to Earth. But it shares a crit­i­cally flawed plot ele­ment with the more recent Watch­men (read The Dork Report review). In the lat­ter, mor­tal hero­ine Silk Spec­tre must con­vince Dr. Man­hat­tan, an ambiva­lent non­hu­man that couldn’t care less, to save the world. Klaatu arrives on Earth to receive the report of an ear­lier agent, who con­firms humans are self destruc­tive by nature. That’s enough for Klaatu to begin to purge the planet, but the agent goes on and tries to impress upon him human’s com­plex­ity. Klaatu is unswayed. Helen and her son Jacob (Jaden Smith, son of Will and Jada Pinkett-Smith) try to do the same and suc­ceed just as Silk Spec­tre did, but in both cases the audi­ence can’t quite under­stand how their argu­ments go through to supe­rior beings one step away from god­hood. Because she’s pretty, and her kid whines so much that Klaatu caved in just to shut him the hell up? Per­son­ally, if I was an alien judg­ing human­ity, and I met such an insanely annoy­ing kid, I would purge the planet too. The movie would merit at least one more Dork Report star if the kid hadn’t been in it.

Jen­nifer Con­nelly in The Day the Earth Stood Still

Jen­nifer Con­nelly is sadly wasted, again. As in Ang Lee’s oth­er­wise under­rated Hulk, she’s rel­e­gated to second-billing below the com­puter effects. The great Kathy Bates fares even worse in a role any­one could have played. As for the leg­endary John Cleese’s cameo as a mad sci­en­tist, I assume the idea was to cast a slightly kooky per­son­al­ity with a British accent to project intel­li­gence to dumb Amer­i­can audi­ences. But the for­merly manic Cleese has mel­lowed out so much in his later years that they could have just cast any old Brit.

The orig­i­nal Day the Earth Stood Still was quite obvi­ously a Cold War para­ble, if a lit­tle mud­dled in its par­tic­u­lars. This ver­sion skirts the pol­i­tics of war, choos­ing instead to recast the basic premise as an eco-parable. Much like M. Night Shyamalan’s Hap­pen­ing (read The Dork Report review), New York’s Cen­tral Park is ground zero for an eco­log­i­cal cat­a­stro­phe. Part of Klaatu’s mis­sion is to save sam­ples of the Earth’s bios­phere, which the Sec­re­tary of Defense (Bates) explic­itly equates to the Bib­li­cal tale of Noah’s Ark.

Wikipedia notes the film was a largely green pro­duc­tion, in which the crew recy­cled or donated props and cos­tumes, and uti­lized a cen­tral intranet to reduce paper waste. But within the story itself, for an alien con­cerned about clean­ing up the Earth, Klaatu is quite con­tent to ride back and forth from Man­hat­tan to New Jer­sey in a gas-guzzling SUV (the man­u­fac­turer of which no doubt pro­vided prod­uct placement).

Finally, some ques­tions: exactly how much of the world is dec­i­mated in the end? How does Klaatu expect human­ity to clean up the planet when he’s already destroyed most of the infra­struc­ture? Imag­ine all the home­less­ness, star­va­tion, chaos, riot­ing, and loot­ing that must be dealt with before any gov­ern­ment could even begin to think about ozone holes or car­bon col­lec­tion. Also, Klaatu’s species has the tech­nol­ogy to dis­in­te­grate all man­made mate­ri­als on an entire planet, but he totally dis­misses out of hand the idea of clean­ing up our pol­lu­tion for us, or at least lend­ing us the tech­nol­ogy? The orig­i­nal Klaatu had more faith in humanity.

Offi­cial movie site: www.dtessmovie.com

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