It's hard to understand why no one thought to smother this baby in its crib. Scott Derrickson's The Day the Earth Stood Still remake is a liberal panic-button picture intent on giving import where it doesn't appear natively and on shoehorning Robert Wise's classic example of genre "message" movie soap-boxing to comment on things (global warming in particular, neo-con warmongering as well) it isn't equipped to process. Besides, choosing Derrickson to helm a mega-budget sci-fi spectacle after the modest, and suspect, success The Exorcism of Emily Rose and the fifth entry in the Hellraiser franchise is one of those Hollywood mysteries. (Was he the last choice? He couldn't have been the only one, could he?) His direction and David Scarpa's script are the culprits in the picture's complete failure. See, it's not just the flat dialogue and laggard pacing, not just the misunderstanding of relationships even while working within the well-defined parameters of a formula framework--it's this mad, desperate desire to have the movie say something about everything. About the climate, about the government, about little boys needing a daddy... About, as all these films are ultimately about, how admirable human beings are--so admirable, in fact, that it would be morally wrong to wipe us off the face of the planet no matter the misdeeds of our spiritual and political leaders, especially someone as unspeakably fine as Jennifer Connelly or as unbearably cool as one of Will Smith's kids. It's happy horseshit, in other words, Pollyannaism disguised as humanism, with gestures so broad and ham-handed that it plays like a GOP caricature of Hollywood lefties. Wow, they are dumb, slogan-happy, pinko hippies.

The fuzzy thinking starts in a superfluous prologue (the exact same one that fuzzy-thinking Terminator: Salvation will use the following summer) wherein we meet our hero Klaatu (Keanu Reeves) in the long-long-ago and understand, following a mystic encounter, that when he reappears decades later, he's no longer any run-of-the-mill surfer dude hiking around in the snow but rather--no way!--an alien surfer dude with a message for mankind. A shame that Klaatu chooses to reveal himself to hundreds of itchy military types as some sort of goo-covered monster instead of as Ted Logan, just as it was a shame way back in 1951 when Michael Rennie's Klaatu pulled what looked like a gun out of his jumpsuit. For an advanced species, these little green men are absolute frickin' morons. Of course the grunts in this lefty pluralist melodrama open fire on gob-of-goo Klaatu, and of course, later, in the lab where the experts are the heroes and the military, led by Secretary of Defense Regina Jackson (Kathy Bates), are the enemy, it's discovered that underneath all that placental muck is Neo hissownself.

Klaatu wants to talk, but, this being the kind of movie it is, only scientor Helen (Connelly) wants to listen. This being the kind of year it was, Helen has a stepson from a biracial marriage, Jacob (Jaden Smith), who will function as the child-like conscience of the piece, fated to save mankind from the pseudo-benevolent alien bat raised against we sinners in the hands of this totally tubular avatar of an angry God. God's muscle is robot Gort, enormous this time around and composed of sentient super-metal prone to flying off into a kazillion little insect-like pieces that consume matter without further harming Earth's precious resources. The aliens, it seems, are here to save the planet from its stewards, because although we know there to be billions of Earth-like planets, it's just like us to be arrogant enough to believe, like Marvell's coy mistress, that our cherry is the ripest for busting of the lot.

But then it doesn't happen. Our planetary virginity remains blushing and chaste as Klaatu and his priapic enforcer learn the power of love through bad dialogue, forced scenarios, and a scene stolen from Starman--which, in hindsight, is a better entry in the alien-as-Christ genre than initially thought. A shame that Spielberg didn't direct this The Day the Earth Stood Still, as the only thing separating Derrickson's film from camp-classic status is the final reveal that Helen is pregnant by Klaatu's host-body's bitchin' sperm. 69! It's disjointed and misguided; what worked moderately well in '51--with this and countless others of the nuclear age positing that the most underestimated of us (i.e., women and children) were the ones carrying the torch for righteousness--simply doesn't work anymore in 2008. Also no longer convincing is the importance of gaining the support of genius Prof. Barnhardt (John Cleese), who, in this iteration, has to convince God of evolution. That's only the big stuff. Poking holes in the rest of the picture's inconsistencies and leaps in reason is a task as Herculean as it is completely pointless. And so it goes.

Befitting its shaggy-dog status as the blockbuster reboot that didn't make any money, Fox sent us one o' them check-disc screeners watermarked throughout with a floating Fox logo and festooned with artifacts and random jitters to prevent someone from uploading this piece of shit for the illegal interest of absolutely no one. The lone advantage to this practice is that it frees me of having to assess the image. The DD 5.1 audio, though, sounds pretty good, Gort's locust-ization (biblical, get it? At least that much is faithful to the original) filling every channel with bombast. Three "Deleted Scenes" (2 mins.) are essentially Keanu getting chauffeured around in a wheelchair to an interrogation he'll interrupt with his Neo powers, muthafucka. At least there's truth in advertising, as the third--and longest--of the scenes is titled "Extended Version of Klaatu Being Wheeled Down Hallway." Listen, thank God they preserved this bit of priceless errata. Look forward no longer to the day when future scholars might have bemoaned the loss of a minute more of Klaatu Being Wheeled Down Hallway the same way we bemoan the loss of forty minutes of The Magnificent Ambersons. That's using your thinker, Fox. The only thing missing is commentary rationale for why one would choose to first truncate this sequence, then offer it as an extra on the DVD.

"Re-Imagining the Day" (30 mins.) is a comparison of sorts of the Wise film to the Derrickson redux featuring historians (including personal fave Paul Sammon) opining about the importance of the fifties' one and only "A-list" sci-fi flick and Derrickson providing an interesting moment in which he praises Reeves' acting style. (It's a bit like praising his African-American-ness.) I would argue with the contention that the Wise film is the prime example of atomic paranoia--in truth, there's a strange fascism to the original that I've always found off-putting and vaguely martial. "Do what we say or Hulk Smash!"--it's Christianity recast as fear and the Commies arrayed as godless heathens ripe for the smiting in an early clue that Wise would go from doing all that fucked up shit with Val Lewton to directing The Sound of Music. "Unleashing Gort" (14 mins.) has effects supervisor Jeffrey Okun talking about how they updated one of the two iconic robots from the 1950s. I would've appreciated a more detailed explanation of why Gort turned into a swarm of insects (what I thought of during those scenes is that "Simpsons" where Homer marvels, "So Marge was made of bees"), but wiser to speculate, I guess. "Watching the Skies: In Search of Extraterrestrial Life" (23 mins.) is this weird chimera of promotional piece mixed with what you'd expect from a bunch of talking-heads discussing the UFO phenomenon, while "The Day the Earth Was Green" (14 mins.) is a big pat on the back for making a movie about the end of the world in an eco-friendly way. The centrepiece supplement though is a film-length commentary by writer Scarpa full of long silences and lots of expository narration. He tells us his screenplay is personal, important, and insightful, and he praises everyone involved. You could do the exact same job as Scarpa on a yak-track for this film without necessarily having seen it. A stills gallery, the theatrical trailer, and four "Gort Art Contest Winners" with two "winners" from one artist--they look a lot like fan art submitted to a website--round things out. I have no clue how this DVD reflects the final release, though I hear there's a three-disc edition.-Walter Chaw

© Film Freak Central; filmfreakcentral.net. This review may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, without the express consent of its author.

Buy at Amazon USA
Buy at Amazon Canada

DVD VITALS:
Running Time
104 minutes
MPAA
PG-13
Aspect Ratio(s)
2.35:1 ONLY, 16x9-enhanced
Languages
English DD 5.1,
French Dolby Surround,
Spanish Dolby Surround
CC
Yes
Subtitles
English, Spanish
DVD-9
Fox

Buy THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL posters at Moviegoods (click on image)

What's coming out on DVD? Check the release calendar

Published: June 10, 2009