The Day the Earth Stood Still

I have to confess that I have not yet seen the original. I know it is a bad confession to make, but there it is. I was going to watch it, but I decided to wait until after seeing the sure to be awful remake so the original would not get ruined for me. I do, however, like my alien movies to be action packed Independence Day style movies and this remake looked like a rollicking good time with trucks dissolving and big spheres hanging out in central park.

The Government is rounding up all these intellectual types because something is happening in New York and they have to be flown away from New York in order to study what happened. It is like gathering the best of our country to keep them safe and repopulate the Earth in case some bad stuff goes down. Only, whatever bad thing they expected to happen does not happen. Instead a giant sphere lands in central park, it gets very bright and something steps out of it. Being America, we shoot first and the alien goes down, then out of the fog comes a giant robot alien, who shuts down all of our weapons to a trend to the fallen alien. The fallen alien comes around, is born and grows up to be Klatu(Keanu Reeves). He desires to speak to the world leaders, but instead he is going to be questioned and possibly tortured. This does not sit too well with Klatu and he works his alien mojo and gets free, but he needs to heal himself so he finds a way to get in touch with Helen Bensen, one of the smart people who found Klatu. They bond and she helps him until he reveals that the human race is going to be destroyed because they have treated the planet poorly. Oh man Al Gore would be so happy! Helen spends the rest of the movie trying to convince Klatu that the human race is worth saving by taking him to see a Nobel prize winning genius and getting Klatu to spend time with her step-son, Jacob (The all too adorable Jaden Smith). While this is going on, the giant robot thing dissolves into thousands of little termites that eat away at the planet in seconds.

Every sort of action that you see in the trailer is all of the action that is in the movie save for one moment where Keanu kills a dude and brings him back to life (the only good moment). The Day the Earth Stood Still is so boring I forgot I watched it briefly. A lot of talking goes on about how humans are bad, but we have this other side. The other side is love, compassion, forgiveness and manners. Those outweigh our nasty shoot first side. The movie portrays our government as anti everything but pro war and does not care to communicate with an alien life force. I wonder what our government will be portrayed when Obama officially takes over. Jennifer Connelly, as Helen, must have wanted a quick check because she is way too good for a movie like this and Keanu, well he is actually exactly as good as this movie deserves. He keeps getting roles for some unknown reason, but here he is totally vacant and is almost laughable at times.

The Day the Earth Stood Still wants us to think about how we treat the world and how we treat each other, which is all fine and good, but within the story of the movie, the leaders never know that is the problem. Klatu never gets to tell anyone but Helen what is supposed to happen. The idea of alien life is never given its proper respect and people come to accept it just a little too easily for my taste. I wanted some people to be totally crazed by it. The effects make up for some of the downsides, but the movie as a whole just kind of sucks. I have seen many movies that are worse than it, but I think in a few days I will have completely forgotten this movie exists. It is just so bland and vacant.