Everything about The Day The Earth Stood Still is disjointed – doesn’t connect, doesn’t compute, doesn’t resonate. The story, character relationships, and even the special effects lack the cohesion necessary to grab hold of for the ride. Things happen to be sure, but they’re lonely pieces – disparate parts of other films, ideas, creators thrown together to make brown. To compare this remake to Robert Wise’s classic 1951 original would be cruel, but even as a creation from whole cloth a critical beating is still an act of charity. Justice would be banishment.
Jennifer Connelly is Helen Benson, an accomplished enough scientist that in an early, overwrought scene government agents (“Ma’am you’ll have to come with us.”) show up at her door to “volunteer” her for an elite team the government’s put together in order to study Manhattan — because in about an hour all that will be left of the Big Apple is dust after something hellbent from outer space hits. Much to everyone’s surprise, except for those of us who’ve seen the trailer and wonder what the point of this twenty-minute charade was, Manhattan is not destroyed. Instead, Klaatu (Keanu Reeves) and his giant robot, Gort, step out of a gaseous sphere with the kind of Totalitarian intentions only fans of Hugo Chavez could love.
Klaatu is an alien being from another planet come to save ours. With dead eyes and robotic movement, he expresses his disgust with man’s treatment of Mother Earth in a single-note, monotone voice made up of equal parts moral superiority and self-parody.
Yes, Klaatu is Al Gore.
For Hollywoodists it makes sense for Reeves’ Klaatu to land in Central Park. After all, second only to themselves, New York City is the center of the universe. As a story point, however, this makes no sense. In the original Klaatu not only landed dead in the heart of American democracy, Washington D.C., but also in the heart of America itself as represented by a baseball field. For most of America (those folks Hollywood used to make movies for), the sight was an unsettling reminder of our own vulnerability, whereas Central Park ranks only as an unsettling reminder of how many bad romantic comedies Hollywood produces every year.
The other problem is that until some visionary director like a Christopher Nolan takes his time with a new approach, cinematically Manhattan is completely played out. Even Woody Allen has moved on, and director Scott Derrickson (who made the surprisingly good Exorcism of Emily Rose) just isn’t up to photographing the city with any more imagination than your average sitcom.
TDTESS has more than just cohesion problems. There are logic gaps which undercut the entire narrative. This is one of those movies where you spend a lot of time asking yourself, Why doesn’t he just do this? The answer is, of course, Because then there would be no movie.
Unlike the Klaatu of the original film, brought to life with warmth and intelligence by Michael Rennie, whose powers never went beyond the ability to unlock a door, Reeves’ Klaatu has mental gifts strong enough to toss cars about and use electrical systems to dispatch security guards from afar. If his mission is to address all the world through the United Nations or otherwise, what’s stopping him? Certainly not the American Defense Secretary (Kathy Bates, there for a paycheck and looking guilty doing it). The problem is that there are no rules to Reeves’ powers which in turn removes any sense of jeopardy and makes everything he does seem designed only for those Insert Big Effect Scene Here moments.
Another serious mistake, and a major deviation from the original, is to offer up yet another fugitive film where Klaatu, Benson, and her stepson Jacob (Jaden Smith, Will and Jada Pinkett-Smith’s son), are all on the run from the authorities. Because none of the characters even come close to connecting and the action scenes are poorly choreographed and shot, you feel like your watching a beat sheet. The dots are there but no one took the time to connect them.
Worse still are the special effects. Not a thing dreamed up via big-budget computers ranks as even close to the unforgettable iconography of the original. Gort is re-imagined without any imagination. Now he’s a few stories tall, black, and purely a creation of obvious CGI, proving once again that bigger is not better and no substitute for real talent.
There’s just nothing to recommend here. The performances are stiff and uninteresting and there’s not a single action or sci-fi set-piece memorable enough that I would be able to describe it after less than 24 hours. So short of hitting the mark, comparing it to the original would be misleading. What you’re most reminded of is another ill-conceived remake of a classic, sci-fi film from the fifties; last years equally disastrous The Invasion.
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