Klaatu, Barada, Nikto! “The Day the Earth Stood Still”

The original (and still classic) The Day the Earth Stood Still was intended to be a corrective to all those sci-fi movies that had held scientific progress up as the world’s new theology. While trafficking in a heavy Christian allegory, the movie wisely chooses not to be a reflexive exaltation of stupidity, but instead an Icarus-like reminder that science is an equal-opportunity tool, and that bigger dogs in the Universe may have mastered much more of it than we. The remake sends Keanu Reeves to force Ludditism down our throats in the name of the environment. Aw crap. And while we’re at it, between this and The Happening, the environment is really starting to piss me off. If it doesn’t get a better PR flack, I may go out and buy a Hummer just so I can ram it into the polar bear tank at the zoo.

The remake follows the basic outline of the original. The alien herald Klaatu arrives on Earth, only this time in an iridescent sphere (a very effective special effect that looks like a ball of sky and weather patterns). Rather than land in the National Mall so he can address Congress, he lands in Central Park so he can address the UN (he can traverse the galaxy in a bio-ship, but he’s not smart enough to know that crosstown traffic is a real bitch). He’s met by a team of a NASA scientists led by an exhausted–looking (and utterly wasted) Jon Hamm, who’ve been tracking his descent and are under the impression that what they’re seeing is actually a massive meteor, which will undoubtedly level Manhattan once it impacts Earth. So they sent their scientists out to its expected impact point (uh, what?). He’s also greeted by most of the NYPD and a military force slightly larger than the one we used to invade Iraq (”Welcome to Earth! Twitch and we’ll blow you to hell. And here’s a parking ticket.”)

Part of the scientific team is Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly), who alone has the courage to meet the goopy-looking alien emerging from the sphere. He’s shot by some trigger-happy yea-hoo and immediately rushed to a hospital, where he promptly molts his goopy-ness and emerges as Keanu Reeves, who introduces himself as Klaatu and wants to address the UN. This idea is scotched when the Secretary of Defense shows up (Kathy Bates, looking like Sarah Palin after she ate John McCain). Of course it would be too much to hope that the Secretary of State would show up to meet with an alien emissary. Anyway, she announces that the President and VP are holed up in undisclosed locations, and they basically consider him a threat to all of humanity. En route to Gitmo, Klaatu escapes and, with Helen’s help, goes about his nebulous agenda.

This is about where the movie implodes. Up until this point, The Day the Earth Stood Still was an entertaining, if not-terribly-convincing, alien-invader movie that had some momentum built on its mystery. Once Keanu/Klaatu meets his contact (James Hong) in a suburban McDonalds, the movie pretty much becomes inert. Compounding the problem is the badly-shoe-horned subplot concerning Helen’s attempts to connect with her stepson Jacob (Jaden Smith, Will’s son/daughter—it’s hard to tell). Jacob’s basically a little cockbag that needs a good smack upside the head (or several). Spending the remainder of the movie with him, is like spending the remainder of the movie with an impacted molar.

Along the way, Helen learns Klaatu’s mysterious plan. His people have decided to rescue the Earth from humanity, and, having been unable to give an ultimatum to the UN, he and his robotic hitman, Gort, are charged with wiping us out. Hey, thanks for helping out Helen. Maybe next time Mugabe’s in town you can give him a ride to the 7-11, too. Helen promptly goes about trying to convince Klaatu not to wipe us out. To that end, she takes him to see her friend Professor Barnhardt (John Cleese), who won a Nobel Award for “Ethical Biology.” He basically argues that humanity changes for the better when it’s completely screwed. Honestly, this is the best argument he can come up with? How hard is it to win a Nobel prize anyway? Well, having failed with the whole “we dig ourselves out of our holes nicely” argument, he implores Helen, “You must change his mind, not with reason, but with yourself!” I think he means she should wear something with a lower neckline.

Well, Klaatu’s not convinced, so Gort looses a plague of metallic locusts, which promptly devour everything in their path. But wait! And eleventh hour visit to Jacob’s father’s headstone in Arlington, and his tearful reconciliation with Helen melt Klaatu’s synthetic heart, and he sacrifices himself to stop the Armageddon already in progress. The cost, however, is our technology—power grids, machines, vehicles all go offline. Now we can return to an earlier, simpler age in which mankind lived in harmony with nature. Tyler Durden would be orgasmic.

Basically, whenever it tries to think, The Day the Earth Stood Still remake completely self-destructs. It makes sense in the original that witnessing the love and decency of average people would change Klaatu’s mind. In it there is hope that we can avert the possibility of nuclear annihilation. How this applies to an eco-friendly message is beyond me. Even the movie’s central argument—at the precipice, we evolve—is pretty much bunk. It reminds me of Tenfeet’s observation that the elation over Obama’s election was somewhat undercut by the suspicion that voters didn’t make a stride forward so much as respond to the Republicans utter ruination of the country by considering any alternative, even if it was the black-guy-possibly-Muslim, was preferable to complete annihilation. And the whole notion of a pre-industrial utopia is just fucking simplistic thinking. Yeah, industrialization has a cost, but the benefits–like, you know, modern medicine, shelter, the ability to feed more people, the opportunity to meet and exchange ideas with different people from faraway places—are what fuels moral and ethical progress. Newsflash: no one gives a crap about human rights when they’re struggling just to feed their families. You know, nasty, brutish, and short.

On top of the thematic incomprehensibility, there is the plain incompetence of much the movie. One location is identified as being in Virginia, yet the exterior view clearly shows the LA desert in the background. When the technology all goes unk at the end of the movie, it somehow even affects the SecDef’s analog wristwatch (uh, what? Is Klaatu a member of the Khumer Rogue?) For his part, Klaatu seems to have godlike powers (he can bring the dead back to life, pluck helicopters out of the sky, bend technology to his will), but he still needs Helen to drive him everyplace. He’s like the most powerful extraterrestrial junior high-schooler ever.

As Klaatu, Reeves brings his signature blankness in full force. In the movie’s decent first third, it’s effectively unsettling, but it wears thin as the movie goes on. It also makes Klaatu’s change of heart somewhat befuddling, since he’s as wooden at the end of the film, as he was when he emerged from his goop. For her part, Connelly does her best with a fairly uninspiring role, she’s credible as a brilliant scientists, and even, improbably, as the caring, concerned stepmother. That last one is a real triumph given how atrocious Jaden Smith is. Relentlessly selfish, obnoxious, and mean, it’s utterly baffling that he/she/it could have played any role in Klaatu’s decision to spare the planet. If anything, I’d guess twenty minutes with the kid and K-Dawg would be calling in the locusts. Jacob’s tearful heart-to-heart with Helen comes too late to ameleorate the bad will the little bastard builds up in the course of the film. I kept hoping Klaatu would choose to abduct the kid for dissection or as a sideshow in some alien circus somewhere around Alpha Centuri.

But ultimately, I couldn’t help feeling as a humanistic tale, The Day the Earth Stood Still missed the boat. Klaatu comes to Earth, complaining about how we treat the planet, then threatening reprisal. He’s basically a galactic condo-board chairman, bitching about the length of our grass and the plastic flamingos in the backyard. If this movie really wanted to exalt humanity, it would have ended with a couple nukes launched into the Arctic Circle—a loud and clear message to Klaatu and the rest of the paternalistic jackholes watching us: It’s our planet, and we’ll do whatever the hell we want. I suppose that’s too much to hope for in the sequel.

ADDITIONAL NOTE: Gort was kind of cool, but he didn’t do much. I could have used a few more scenes of him destroying military hardware. That never gets old.