The Day the Earth Stood Still 2008[Best Quality]

Robert Wise’s 1951 “The Day the Earth Stood Still” was a thoughtful movie about aliens who came to Earth to warn mankind that if it continued building nuclear weapons and making war it would be wiped out by the advanced civilizations to whom it posed danger. The new Keanu Reeves-starring version is not only not thoughtful, it is positively stupid. Here, the aliens are a bit annoyed that we’re messing up the Earth and are planning to wipe out mankind in order to save the planet. They are a kind of alien Greenpeace with weapons of mass destruction at their disposal.

The movie is dumbly written, by David Scarpa, and dumbly directed, by Scott Derrickson. Like most of the truly dumb, it’s convinced it’s a lot more intelligent than it actually is. It’s not even banal in a way that has any flair. You keep looking for a little life, intelligent or otherwise, anywhere in it, but it just sits there like a stale doughnut.

Perhaps I am being a little over critical. There was one thing that I liked which was that the agents of man’s destruction here turned out to be little bugs that ate everything in their path, and turned it into more little bugs. I’m not convinced from the mess they were making that they were planning to save the planet though.

If you really want to see it I’ll warn you now, there may be some spoilers in this review, depending on your level of sophistication as a movie watcher, but I am unrepentant, because nothing I can do can spoil this movie.

Jennifer Connelly plays Helen Benson, an astro-biologist who lives with a totally black stepson. Jaden Smith is, of course, the son of Will Smith, and to justify him playing the part, we are told that his mother died a long time ago, that she then took up with his father and his father – a soldier – died in a war. This adds nothing whatever to the themes or ideas of the movie.

Anyhow, one night, after she has gone home, she gets a mysterious call that tells her people will be at her door any minute, but offers no further information. She is abducted by Homeland Security types, who keep her in the dark to provide a little unmotivated tension for audiences. Except that as we don’t care very much about her so far, or about this silly set up, it creates no tension at all.

After being bundled into a helicopter with many other space scientist types, she’s eventually informed that an unidentified object is about to smash into the Earth at super high velocity in an hour or so, which makes you wonder why they have been carried to the impace site. This leads to a scene where everyone is counting down the scenes to the very second it will smash into Central Park and cause a major planetary extinction, but – of course – it doesn’t. Mankind and all its tracking devices are too stupid to notice that it must have been slowing down.

In keeping with the environmental message, the object looks like a big swirling planet made of light. At scientists approach it, a humanoid figure comes out. A nervous soldier shoots. The figure falls to the ground, which enrages a giant robot that appears and starts removing the power from everything in the vicinity and smashing things up. The figure on the ground says: “Klaatu baradu niktu” which, as in the original version, means “Stop”.

As scientists try to operate on the wounded alien, big chunks of blubber-like material start coming off of it, and there’s an even more human-like form inside. After a bit of quick development the form turns into Keanu Reeves as Klaatu.

He wants to talk to the United Nations about how we’re messing up our world. The US government officals, headed by Kathy Bates as Regina Jackson, think it would be a better idea if they restrained him and tortured him. That’s a mistake. Helen Benson has not drugged him as she was requested to do, and by controlling electro-magnetic signals he escapes.

A little later, he calls Helen and her son, and asks her to help him. He’s still being chased by every security force in America, but the three of them go on the run. He tells Helen that he’s here to save the Earth. She is the only one in the movie theatre dumb enough to think that means us. It’s another tricksy bit that thinks itself clever but that is in fact appallingly weak.

Klaatu arranges a meeting with another alien disguised as an old Chinese man. The two of them chat in Putonghua. It seems Keanu Reeves doesn’t only know kung fu, he also knows Chinese. Well, kind of. Watching that scene in a Hong Kong cinema is one of the movie’s few delights, only because of the way people all around you are cracking up with laughter.

The old Chinese alien tells him he’s grown to like humans, and that the aliens probably shouldn’t destroy them. Helen also thinks she should convince him that humanity is worth saving, so she takes him to see an allegedly brilliant scientist Professor Barnhardt (played by Monty Python’s John Cleese). He solves a complex mathematical formula on Barnhardt’s blackboard, so the professor knows he’s the real thing.

The professor guesses that the aliens too once probably came pretty close to destroying themselves, but that it was only when they were close to destruction that they got their act together. He tells Klaatu that mankind is at that “tipping point”, thus providing a useful plug for Malcolm Gladwell’s book of the same name. And it wouldn’t be very nice for aliens to wipe us out rather than give us the chance to pull ourselves together.

In the professor’s house, Klaatu also gets to hear some music by Bach, which also seems to be a point in our favour.

Meanwhile the military are messing about with the giant robot, and manage to get it riled up enough to turn into a swarm of flies that eat everything in their path. Klaatu doesn’t know if he can stop the destruction that’s already begun.

The 1951 version of “The Day the Earth Stood Still” had some plot holes. The new version is nothing but plot holes. It’s single biggest and must stupid flaw is that these aliens are supposed to have been planting glowing spheres all around our planet for ages, and watching us closely, but they didn’t figure out our good points until one of them turned into Keanu Reeves and heard some classical music. Even government committees do a better job of background research than that.

In the original, the alien landed in Washington, which made some sense. Here he plonks himself down in Central park. Maybe the real Homeland Security wouldn’t let them film in Washington. In the original he’s here to warn us to turn away from war, so the future remains in our hands. Here, there’s not really much of a reason for him to even turn up. The aliens could just have pushed a button out in space. For an advanced civilization these aliens are really not very bright.

In terms of the casting, Keanu Reeves is his usual self, Kathy Bates is miscast, John Cleese is unconvincing, Jaden Smith is excruciatingly bad. And the movie manages to make Jennifer Connelly uninteresting. Get hold of the old version with Michael Rennie on DVD. It’s a bit slow at times, a bit preachy. But it’s never as unrewarding as this. If aliens had to watch movies like this, rather than hear music by Bach, to decide whether mankind should survive, we’d be toast.

The Day the Earth Stood Still 2008 R5 line

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0970416/

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