The Day The Earth Stood Still

I want to stress the point: this is not an awful movie. It certainly is no quality piece of film-making, and you'd be hard pressed to say this is even a good movie. However, for what I paid, I came, I saw, I was mildly entertained. Is it completely unnecessary? Yes, it certainly is. In fact, I won't even bother making any real comparison to the 50's classic, because quite honestly, as a remake it fails miserably. Instead, this film shall be judged on its own merits. Be warned gentle reader, I will be going into full spoiler territory.

Meet Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly). She is a Biology professor at a nameless Manhattan University. She has a class consisting of around 10 students, several of whom look as if they're overdue for their appointment with Mr. Needle. Helen is sad. Meet her stepson Jacob (Jaden Smith. YES, the son of THAT other fellow going by the last name of 'Smith'). He is sad, because his engineer father was recently killed overseas. Unfortunately, he vents his sadness by being the single most annoying, disrespectful child character ever committed to celluloid. And believe me, I have seen some real doozies. Most of his interactions with Helen consist either of him ignoring her, or coming off as a complete jackass. Its a wonder this kid has never been physically punished, and believe you me, there were numerous occasions where I wished I could strangle the little bastard. You heard me, gentle reader, say YES to child abuse. In short, his being sad makes the audience sad. He made me feel truly sad.

Meet Klaatu (Keanu Reeves). He too is sad. You see, all he wants to do is deliver a simple message. Klatuu is an alien, and he has come here to tell us that since Earth is one of the few planets capable of supporting life (yeah, right), we have a few options available to us. Our constant maltreatment of the Earth has resulted in some Intergalatic Council laying down a ultimatum: either we shape up, or they exterminate us. Unfortunately, he was shot by the dick-headed military upon arrival, and now the government, since being exterminated doesn't fit into their schedule, try to stop him at various means. Helen, still being sad, decides to help Klatuu, hoping to convince him we are a race worth saving. Bringing your bastard of a step-son really doesn't help you in that regard...

The stage is set for what could have been a fun romp. Unfortunately, the term 'fun-romp' is the first of many problems this film has. Trying to mesh the thoughtful, pessimistic tone of the original with the Michael Bay, blow-everything-to-hell sensibility just doesn't work. As a result, the film has a huge chase of identity disorder: is it trying to be a thoughtful, thinking man's science fiction? Or does it just want to cater to the crowd that get erections whenever something blows up? In the end, it does neither particularly well.

The blame certainly doesn't lay with the direction. Scott Derrickson has a solid hand on the proceedings throughout, even managing to squeeze in a few extremely striking visual shots, with one of the Orb spaceships rising from the sea and being silhouetted by the setting sun being particularly note-worthy. Some of the military encounters with Klatuu's guard bot Gort are well handled, if unspectacular overall.

The actors, for the most part, do the best with their severely underwritten characters. Connelly brings the right amount of humanity to her role (Hollywood, please feed this woman. Africans aren't the only ones who are going hungry...). For the most part, Keanu does what he plays best, playing Keanu. Luckily him, this acting style fits in quite nicely with an alien creature unfamiliar with human customs and speech patterns. Unfortunately, his character is not nearly complex enough. Virtually all we know about him is he has some vaguely defined power over electricity, which can let him emit a deafening sonic whine, crash helicopters, and throw cars with extreme force (more on that later). However, they can't all be roses. Jaden Smith is simply awful; I mean, I know his character was poorly written right from the get-go, but it still doesn't stop him from turning in a preformance that mainly consists of him pouting like a child being told he can't have fudge cookies for supper.

So where does the blame lay, you ask? The script. Jesus Christ. The thing is, there are some good ideas. The updating the Cold-War worries from the original to global-warming, a very real and topical fear, and taking it to the extent where beings unknown to us have to forcefully step in struck me as quite clever. And its all downhill from there. Smith's character aside, there are several GLARING plotholes that are simply inexcusable.

1. First of all, the fate of humanity is decided in a MCDONALDS?!?. Reeves meets up with a fellow alien who has been living amongst us for 70 years on a reconaissance mission. He immediately tells Klatuu what a despicable, thuggish race humans are. Basically, he gives Klatuu the go ahead to begin the End. However, as soon as Klatuu tells him to get out of Dodge, the informer does a sudden 180 and basically says humans are extremely likeable in their own way, and he plans on dieing with them. WHAT. THE. HELL.

2. Later on, Keanu kills a cop, by crushing him with his own squad-car, only to bring him to life seconds later. His reasoning? He doesn't like killing people when its unecessary. What? He's been sent to kill an entire species because they can't clean up after themselves and play well with each other, but killing one person weighs on his conscience. Whatever.

3. Near the beginning, when it seems a metoerite is going to smash into Central Park and wipe out almost all life on Earth, the government assembles a team of scientists, Helen included, to help reconstruct after impact. Logical enough plan, no? Well, do you know where the gov't plans to have them when the meteor hits? Where they decide to put the men and women in charge of helping out after there's a big boom? Well, I'll tell you. RIGHT. OVER. CENTRAL PARK. Do you remember that Simpsons episode with the comet? And one of their plans is to have houses equipped with robot legs so the house can flee the scene? Well, the planning behind that is absolutely brilliant when compared to putting the most valuable people on the Earth in helicopters right over the impact site. God damn.

4. Near the climax of the film, Gort becomes an enormous particle cloud and begins devouring the city. For reasons not explained, Klatuu suddenly sees the human race IS in fact worth fighting for, so he goes to his ship and lets loose a pulse that destroys Gort. As well as permeanantly wiping out electricity, thus stopping our ability to muck up nature any more. Sorry? Why didn't they just knock humanity back to the Stone Age right from the get go? The whole moral dilemna on the part of the humans becomes totally pointless by this point.

The special effects are wildly uneven as well. While the sphere that Klatuu travels in is an impressive effect, Gort's first appearance is hugely disappointing, with the obviously CGI robot looming over obviously CGI tanks, the whole thing looks like a videogame cut-scene and offers no sense of scale. The cloud's destruction is underwhelming as well, with the only things being destroyed being a truck, a empty stadium, and a empty restaurant. Seeing empty places being demolished by an obvious effect is definitely not the last word in excitement (Please, stop using the whole digital cloud effect. I don't know what kind of discount you get for having cloud forms go on rampages in movies, but it sucked in Fantastic Four: Rise of The Silver Surfer, and it sucked here too).

Here's the way the film should have ended: near the end, the swarm begins to go inside of Jaden Smith. Instead of activating the pulse, the very last scene is Klatuu laughing hysterically as the child is devoured from the inside out. Roll Credits. Memo to the writer: if you had ended the film this way, you can guarantee I owuld have been with this film 100%