December 12, 2008 | Arguably the worst reconstitution of a ‘50s sci-fi classic since the ghastly Godzilla remake – that 1998 travesty made by boneheads who forgot the Original Gangsta Lizard can, like, breathe fire – The Day the Earth Stood Still is a stunningly misconceived folly that is bearable only for as long as it remains a fair-to-middling chase movie. During its final act, alas, it repeatedly sacrifices narrative logic for CGI-spawned spectacle, all the while building toward an ending that aims for the ambiguity of 2001, but misses by several light years.
For the benefit of those who tuned in late: The original 1951 Day the Earth Stood Still was a cautionary Cold War-era fable – intelligently scripted by Edmund North, efficiently directly by Robert Wise – about a tough-loving extraterrestrial, Klaatu (played with unflappable dignity by Michael Rennie), who issues an ultimatum to earthlings hellbent on threatening each other (and, by extension, the rest of the universe) with nuclear weapons: Chill out, or get chilled. Klaatu is accompanied on his peacemaking mission by a humongous robot named Gort – a laser-armed behemoth who responds to the classic command, “Gort! Klaatu barada nikto!” – but he demonstrates his ability to obliterate humanity in a scrupulously non-violent (yet totally convincing) fashion.
In the new but not improved version, Keanu Reeves takes over the role of Klaatu, who’s been re-imagined by director Scott Derrickson (The Exorcism of Emily Rose) and scriptwriter David Scarpa as a vaguely-defined alien life force that assumes human form, and doesn’t seem particularly happy about it.
Rennie under-acted the part to the point of sporadic stasis, but Reeves makes him look in retrospect like an over-caffeinated show-off. On the other hand – and there’s no way to say this without sounding snarky – Reeves has the edge when it comes to conveying the concept of a stranger in a strange land, and a strange body. The deliberateness of Reeves’ gestures and the monotone of his speech, often cause for unintended laughter in other movies, are altogether appropriate here.
So it’s not really Reeves’ fault that this updated remake — in which Klaatu has zero tolerance for global warming, not nuclear proliferation – is about as satisfying as a plate of lukewarm leftovers.
Derrickson lavishes expensive production values on his twice-told tale, and, to his credit, generates some modest suspense here and there. After being wounded by a trigger-happy Army marksman, Klaatu escapes from a heavily-guarded government laboratory and takes flight with a sympathetic scientist (Jennifer Connelly, in the kinda-sorta equivalent of the role originally played by Patricia Neal) and her too-cute-by-half stepson (Jaden Smith).
And even though they’re being pursued by what looks like all branches of the U.S. armed services and the combined police departments of three or four states, the fugitives have time to briefly visit another scientist (John Cleese) while making a wink-wink, nudge-nudge allusion to a key scene from the ’51 film.
But the remake jumps the tracks, and quickly plummets into frenzied incoherence, when the new film’s bigger and badder version of Gort transforms itself into… into… well, gee, it’s hard to describe. A swarm of high-tech locusts, maybe?
In any event, what follows is a great deal of f/x excess, as various large items — a trailer truck here, a football stadium there – are arbitrarily destroyed in scenes that seem designed less to advance the plot than to jazz up TV ads and coming-attractions trailers. This in turn leads to an ending that reprises Klaatu’s ultimate power play from the ’51 movie, for no apparent purpose. After that, the remake doesn’t conclude, it merely stops.
At which point, audiences can be forgiven for shouting rude remarks at the screen.
