My review of the new DVD edition of 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still is contained within my Movie Marketing Madness column covering the remake of the movie.
The best part about the appearance of the new movie is that it prompted Fox to re-release the 1951 original.
Re-watching the film via a review copy provided to me of the new two-disc special edition, I was struck by just how great this movie is. It’s not epic or intensly personal along the lines of classics like Citizen Kane, Gone With the Wind or others along those lines. But it is just a really, really good movie that captures the feelings of the era it was produced in while still remaining relevant to contemporary audiences.
In the movie, Klaatu arrives on earth with the robot Gort, landing in a Washington D.C. park. Taken into custody after he’s mistakenly shot by a trigger happy soldier, he explains he has a message of importance to the entire world and rejects attempts by single countries to dominate his presentation. Eventually he escapes the hospital he’s being held at and assumes the identity of Mr. Carpenter, trying to get to know what the citizens of the world are like as opposed to their arrogant and short-sighted rulers. He becomes involved in the lives of a single woman and her young son and through them meets one of the leading scientists of the day, who conveniently lives just down the street, and tries to convey to his colleagues the message he has come with from the other inhabited planets.
day-the-earth-stood-still-screenshotEveryone knows the movie was an allegory for the international unrest enveloping the world at the time, the beginning of the Cold War and not long after World War II, and that’s certainly true. But let’s also look at the name Klaatu gives himself: Carpenter. The fact that he comes with a message of peace for the world, is mistrusted and hunted by the authorities, dies and comes back for a short period in order to finish his mission gives him kind of undeniable Christian overtones as well. I had never really caught that until watching it this time and now it’s a notion that I can’t shake.
The DVD special edition transfer looks fantastic. I’m by no means an expert in pixels and compression rates or other matters but the picture to my eye was crisp and clean and looked great. The first disc also contains a pair of audio commentary as well as - and this is super cool - an isolated audio track that allows you to listen to the legendary theramin-dominated soundtrack all by itself.
Both discs also have between them a handful of documentaries and retrospectives that focus on everything from the movie’s production history to the decoding of the movie’s legendary command phrase to how science fiction films serve as cautionary tales in their respective places in history.
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Chris Thilk