Kelly Wand"The Day The Earth Stood Still" review
December 29th 2008 14:17
Keanu barada nikto.
A drearily Matrix-green remake of the slightly overrated 1951 film of the same name, The Day The Earth Stood Still ‘08 is yet another entry in Hollywood’s science-less apocalypse movies drenched in Christian (i.e., spiritually “uplifting”) symbolism featuring kids and unhappy parents (a la I Am Legend, The Invasion, Signs, Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, and 10,000 B.C.), only less edgy than anything made in 1951. Apparently 20th Century Fox beamed this movie out into space, the better for potential marauding aliens to appreciate our sophisticated computerized cloud graphics, characterization and narrative logic; I predict they do a lot of fast-forwarding. (Fox also produced Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, which has a similar story arc but annoyingly wasn’t beamed anywhere.)
The most memorable element of the original film, the phrase “Klaatu barada nikto,” is inaudible. The idea seems to be to mask the remake’s dearth of ideas with quicksilver smears of CGI, although I don’t recall a single money shot in the whole movie that wasn’t shown in the 15-second TV trailers. Luckily we have Keanu Reeves giving his most inexpressive, monochromatic performance since Sweet November to fill in the arid stretches and distract us from Jaden Smith’s lovably sullen tour de force. (Jaden means well, but he’s no Nathan Gamble, of Babel, The Mist, and The Dark Knight fame -- not to be confused with Mason Gamble of Dennis the Menace fame.) I realize that Reeves is striving for otherworldly, heroically-thoughtful dispassion and that the script by David Scarpa does him no favors, but…if the aliens are so advanced, why would they send so enervated and unpersuasive an ambassador? (Let alone one so unreliable. Spoiler alert.)
The movie opens, inexplicably, in the 1920s Himalayas with an apparently human, bearded, Caucasian played by Keanu finding a spooky Prius-sized green sphere glowing ominously near his tent in the middle of a blizzard. Naturally he chips at it with his pickaxe, and it responds by possessing him with an alien being. Or something. What’s this possessed-Keanu entity do for the next few decades? How does it retain its youth? Did any of his friends and family notice the real Keanu’s disappearance? Did he even disappear at all or just pose as the human Keanu? If so, did people notice he never aged? Or did he age? Was the real Keanu’s personality assimilated somehow or eradicated? Does the sphere remain there to be found by other mountaineers or is it one sphere per climber? Why didn’t the sphere possess Einstein or Thomas Edison instead and prevent us from getting too industrialized in the first place?
Flash forward to “the present.” Jennifer Connelly, lovely and watchable as ever (although what happened to the rack), reprises her thankless role from The Incredible Hulk as a tragic heroine, only this time she’s also a tragic Princeton microbiologist and the widowed curator of Jaden Smith, her lovably frosty stepson. Jaden's dad died recently, along with his natural mother, so he has issues. The movie’s more interested in his issues than Klaatu’s, or in Gort’s issues, which basically confirms that Jaden’s character will survive no matter what, so all of the subsequent scenes with Connelly in tears over his possible demise can't be intended as suspense. Some Government officials show up on Connelly’s doorstep and force her to accompany them to a secret installation conveniently near Manhattan along with, much to Connelly’s growing suspicion, a bunch of other specialists in geology, xenolinguistics, nanorobotics, and cybernetic falconry, all assembled from around the globe and herded onto Connelly’s helicopter within minutes apparently. Secretary of Defense Kathy Bates debriefs Connelly that a glowing green sphere is about to impact the Earth, extinguishing all life. The good news: the President and Vice-President have been evacuated to safe locations, never to be heard from, consulted, or named ever again. Wait, why would the Government bother rounding up all these specialists in different fields for an imminent astronomical collision? Apparently they’re pretty far-sighted, although future events will belie this repeatedly.
The sphere slows down, and lands in Central Park*. A gray humanoid blob comes out, which Connelly alone approaches and is about to awestrickenly touch when some Army guy’s gun goes off, shooting the alien. Gort, a forty-foot-tall robot with a glowing red Cylon eye, emerges from the ship and turns off all the electronics in the area for a few seconds, as a terrifying warning. Then he stands back and lets the humans who just shot his ambassador take it into custody, since we’ve proven that we can be trusted.
The Government doctors are understandably perplexed at how to treat a blob of gray whale blubber of entirely unknown physiology, but luckily they still manage to remove the bullet just before the blob slowly turns into Klaatu Reeves, who wasn’t on Earth this whole time after all. Glad that’s cleared up. Klaatu expresses an interest in addressing the U.N. That he even knows about the U.N. is an encouraging sign, but Bates sympathetically decides to give him a lie-detector test instead (unlike movie studios, Klaatu’s race lacks the technology to simply take over the TV airwaves and issue a global PSA). Despite the small fact that Connelly isn’t a medical doctor, she’s entrusted with sedating Keanu before his polygraph test, even though there’s no reason to think our sedatives (or polygraphs) could affect his nervous system in a desirable manner. During the lie-detector test, Klaatu admits that his “body feels pain” (he just can’t convincingly display it with his face). Within three questions, Klaatu decides to bust out of the facility by giving his interrogator an orgasm via electrocution. Though conceivably Klaatu and/or Gort could easily force their way past any cordon, Connelly “helps” him “escape,” and picks up Jaden Smith along the way without bothering to explain to him that their passenger is an alien being. Why is Connelly helping Klaatu? Because he said something about being here to “save the Earth,” and because Jaden could use a father figure from another galaxy.
The first step of their cosmically crucial mission: go to McDonald’s. There, in the most heart-wrenching McDonald’s scene featuring an alien since Mac and Me, Klaatu meets another alien, an elderly Asian guy, who admits that he’s grown to love humans even though, he concedes, we need to be destroyed ASAP. In fact, he wants to stay and die with us, he loves us so much. Why’d Klaatu and the Asian have to meet in person at McD’s for a two-minute conversation instead of just doing it by phone? Or telepathically? Or at least at IHOP? And not to be cynical but why is humanity in every sci-fi movie so irresistible to beings exponentially more advanced than us? Of all the races in the universe, somehow we shabby tribal primates are the best they can do? That’s like a human deciding he loves some ants in his yard and submitting to pesticides. Actually, maybe the Asian guy is referring to ants. That makes more sense.
Predictably, neither the characters nor the filmmakers evince much interest in the aliens or their ways. Although Klaatu’s origins and philosophy would theoretically be of interest to audiences (or at least Connelly’s scientist character), much screen time is instead devoted to Klaatu asking Jaden Smith about the complexities of his parentage, apparently since Jaden is black and Connelly is white and aliens (or we) care intensely about such details. When Jaden finds out Keanu is an alien, instead of asking him any of the zillion questions most kids would ask, he sells him out to the cops. Or rather, one cop, who has Klaatu at gunpoint (again). Slowly, Klaatu uses his powers over electricity to start up a car and crush the cop to death before the already freaked officer can pull the trigger, then “jump-starts” the cop back to life, which also fortunately reknits broken vertebrae and stops internal bleeding.
Meanwhile, more green spheres are landing worldwide to admit pairs of snakes, dolphins, and bacteria. Presumably – as Kathy Bates speculates (which is all her character can really do) -- they're evacuating all other species in “arks” off-planet, preparatory to a Biblical “flood" (minus a Noah, obviously). Seems odd that the aliens can communicate with all these lesser species sufficiently to guide them aboard, but for us they need Klaatu, who is then himself unable to cope with the U.S. military and media blackouts without the help of a turncoat single mom. Are the aliens aware that 99% of all species that ever lived are already extinct and that humans had nothing to do with it? (We never find out what happens to the animals on these spheres. Or why the aliens don’t grab some vegetation to help sustain them.)
After a few F-16s ineffectually try to blow Gort up with Sidewinder missiles, Kathy Bates concludes that the robot will defend itself in the presence “of violence.” So the Army led by the token dumbass character John Driscoll (played by Kyle Chandler, the guy who played the dumbass in King Kong) boxes Gort up in a massive metal crate and takes him/it to some research lab to have holes drilled into its shoulder, since such actions clearly don’t constitute violence.
Meantime, Klaatu tells Connelly that he and Gort are here to “save” the Earth by obliterating humanity, since the number of Earthlike worlds per capita in the universe is too small to be endangered by the nitwitted likes of us. He never actually says “global warming” by name, which in reality would not destroy the Earth, just mankind, and even in the gloomiest scenarios is still dwarfed in destructive immensity and longevity by myriad epochs of climatological turbulence that occurred before we evolved (dinosaurs to Klaatu: “thanks for nothing”). Klaatu’s race may have mastered interstellar travel but terraforming is beyond them.
Connelly is horrified, then drives Klaatu to meet John Cleese, aka Professor Barnhardt, a reclusive physics genius. After Klaatu solves Barnhardt’s blackboard Sudoku problem with a single chalk-stroke, Barnhardt plays him some Bach and suggests to Klaatu that humans deserve to get off with a warning because Klaatu’s arrival was the life-threatening kick in the ass we needed so we'll change our whole ideas. Klaatu agrees, since his race is clearly not as morally advanced or gifted at rhetoric as John Cleese. Unfortunately, it’s already too late, as Gort has already transformed into a cloud of sometimes invisible nanobots. These promptly begin dissolving the windows of the observation room at the military facility. When Driscoll frantically calls for evacuation, a colonel stoically informs him that the facility is “sealed.” Which is an old Army euphemism for a structure that’s seconds away from no longer existing. (One assumes the fact that our species tends to put Kyle Chandler characters in charge of intergalactic relations is another of the myriad reasons that the elderly Asian alien feels such abiding affection for us.)
Though the nanobots are intended to destroy humans specifically, they promptly focus their consumptive efforts on an unoccupied football stadium and a solitary moving truck.
Meantime, Connelly and Klaatu are chased by helicopters summoned again by lovably disobedient Jaden. One of the copters lassos Connelly up and flies her off, even though they came for Klaatu and not her. Jaden takes Klaatu to a graveyard to try and talk him into raising his dad from the dead, apparently as a zombie, but Klaatu tells him that he can’t (the world’s imminent doom being irrelevant to Jaden). Connelly shows up out of nowhere (luckily she knows Jaden’s predilections for graveyards) and tells Klaatu that he can still “stop it.” He sounds reluctant and dubious. Stopping the nanobot swarm will clearly be difficult, unprecedented. But they drive to Central Park, which the nanobots are pointlessly swarming around without eating anything or -one. Though these creatures gnawed through the speeding truck and stadium in seconds, they’re now slower than people running on foot -- they chase Klaatu, Connelly and Jaden into a brick overpass fringed with huge gaping archways for the nanobots to not pursue through. Klaatu says he’s “holding them off,” but won’t be able to much longer. By not much longer he apparently means not at all, since some of the nanobots have already burrowed into Jaden, whom Connelly has brought along to be endangered. Luckily, once Connelly’s begged and ordered him to a few times, Klaatu realizes that he can remove them and save Jaden. He’s especially impressed that Connelly is also infected but still wants him to save Jaden first, although he doesn’t help her afterward and she’s no longer infected. Then he goes outside and touches a nanobot with his fingertip, which extinguishes the whole cloud permanently and emits an electromagnetic pulse that shuts down all electrical power on Earth, permanently reducing civilization to the stone age, which will mercifully mean the death of 90% of the human population instead of the original 100% the aliens intended. Forlornly, the spheres take off.
“It’s gone,” Connelly says soulfully.
“No,” Jaden Smith replies. “He’s gone.” Pronouns confirmed, credits roll.
Whereas in the 1951 version the aliens were concerned about humans weaponizing space based on our discovery of atomic energy, here the unarticulated idea is that humans need to be removed to prevent global warming that will kill us off anyway (if we represent pollution, why do the aliens use corrosive nanobots that function along the same lines?). The movie’s point is that we’re too dumb to survive without a watchful alien landlord (“God”) threatening us to act in our own self-interest. It’s supposed to be a given that we’re intrinsically worth saving, but based on the actions of Jaden and Bates the movie doesn’t make much of a case that there’s more to us, or our holiday blockbusters, that you can’t easily acquire from a kilo of gray whale blubber.
In that respect, The Day The Earth Stood Still is like Four Christmases.
*At night, making the title a misnomer twice over.
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Comment by Raquelle
Comment by Kelly Wand
Sprocket Holed
Also, why is every science fiction movie made in the '50's a "classic"? Virtually all of them revolve around giant bugs or robots. That makes "Wild Wild West" a classic twice over.
Comment by genekeats
Comment by Anonymous
Oh wait that has already been done. Alien Man what do you think? ....