The Day The Earth Stood Still managed to pull in $30 million dollars this past weekend, which you can mostly attribute to clever marketing, but it’s not a promising number for the much-loathed movie, which is sitting at 21% on Rotten Tomatoes right now. Beyond the wooden acting and the eviscerating of a beloved sci fi classic that most people are talking about, there are some moments in this movie that just make my teeth clench. Moments that are so poorly written, thought out, filmed, and constructed that I just can’t keep myself from venting. Read on to see all five, and just in case it’s not clear enough from the header: there are spoilers below.
The Inept U.S. Government
Okay, aliens land on our planet, including a spectacular arrival in the middle of Central Park. A huge glowing globe descends from the heavens and out comes a strange alien lifeform, and a ginormous robot with a red, glowing eye and it destroys anything that approaches it with violence. The government swoops in and takes the alien away after he tells the robot to back off.
What does the government do with said alien? Oh, nothing much. They simply take him to a room with no windows and no cameras, and leave him alone with a guy armed only with a lie detector. The alien (Keanu Reeves as Klaatu) easily dispatches him, dons his suit, and leaves the facility after deafening everyone with some sort of sonic feedback power. Didn’t it occur to just one person to say “Er, hey wait. We might want to keep this guy under observation. With guns, maybe?”
Silicon vs. Silicone
There’s a scene in this movie that you’ve seen a million times before: an angry Army general marching down a hallway, asking some sort of lab-coated scientist guy to “Tell me what we’re dealing with.” Half the time that general has a cigar jammed in the corner of his mouth while he growls that out. The Day The Earth Stood Still is no different.
This time, the “what we’re dealing with” is the ginormous robot from Central Park, and the lab scientist guy tells the Army guy, “It appears to be some sort of silicone-based life form.” Later we find out that the robot (Gort, in the original. Why couldn’t they tell us his name here?) is made out of billion of tiny nanobots. Which means to say the scientist meant he was a SILICON-based lifeform. Silicon. The stuff that computer chips are made out of. Silicone is the stuff that fake breasts are made out of. Unless Gort is made of out Pamela Anderson’s offcasts, I don’t think this is the message they meant to send. Did no one catch this during filming, post-production, ADR, and screening?
Kathy Bates and The Invisible U.S. President
Chalk this one up as the inept U.S. Government, part 2. As I mentioned before, it’s pretty much a big deal when aliens land on the Earth, let alone when they put hundreds of globes into orbit circling the planet, threatening devastation at any moment. You would tend to think that people would be concerned about that sort of thing going on. World leaders would be paying attention, upper level government officials around the world would be making plans, figuring out how to deal with the aliens and keep their citizens calm, that sort of thing.
Apparently, that’s not what our own president would do. Throughout the entire course of this film, the U.S. President is nowhere to be seen. Kathy Bates plays Secretary of Defense Regina Jackson, and she says, “For all practical purposes, I am the eyes and ears of the President.” Why? Well, because he’s isolated at an undisclosed location. What, no high-tech video phones? No magic iChat video conferencing? No speakerphones, even? You never get to see the face of the President or hear his voice in this entire film, but you do get lots of extreme closeups of Kathy Bates looking concerned. What a bonus.
Product Placement
I was watching Band of Brothers the other day, and there was a scene featuring some of the guys sitting around a table and drinking sodas in glass bottles. After a few minutes I realized, “Oh, that’s a Coca-Cola bottle.” It wasn’t emblazoned with the words, it just had that iconic shape. That’s product placement on a level that I can deal with. What I can’t deal with is the blatant way the The Day The Earth Stood Still tries to cram it down your throat.
Case in point: scientists have been examining the alien body that Klaatu has discarded. Kathy Bates and company march in to inspect their findings. There’s an overhead shot of an enormous Microsoft Surface table, complete with the windows logo in gigantic size, stuck right in the middle of it. I honestly expect to hear the Microsoft startup noise when they activated the thing. Also, in other slightly less obvious scenes, Keanu and company drive up to a McDonald’s, complete with enormous golden arches. Of course, the interior is spotless and filled with happy people. Even James Hong, who Keanu goes to meet, is in a good mood. We also get treated to an extreme close-up of the LG logo on one of the character’s cell phones, just in case you wanted to pick one up for yourself.
The Inexplicable Two Keanus
This remake differs from the classic original by saying that aliens actually visited our planet long ago, and that they’ve been living among us for decades. This steals the thunder from the title a bit. Which day are they saying the Earth stood still? The day the aliens arrived, or the day the aliens nearly destroyed our entire planet? Both of those sound good for standing still, so which is it? If the aliens have already been here for so long, then maybe the Earth has just been slowly standing still? I’m not sure.
In the opening scene, set atop a snowy mountain in 1928, one of the glowing alien spheres comes to Earth. A mountaineer, also played by Keanu Reeves, goes over to investigate it. He’s soon absorbed by it, and then wakes up next to where it was. He’s clearly been changed, but is he now an alien meant to look like the mountain climber it just absorbed? Or is it the same man, spat out like a piece of undigested food? There’s the scene later in the film where Keanu meets with James Hong at McDonald’s, and it is revealed that Hong is an alien as well, and that he’s been living among the humans for 70 years. If you give the 1928 Keanu 10 years to explore, that makes it 1938. 70 years to live among humans, and you’re in 2008. Is James Hong supposed to be Keanu Reeves? Keanu is, and does look slightly, Asian, but him turning into James Hong is a stretch. So what happened to Keanu with Mountain Climbing Action? Is it too much asking for a little bit of explanation here?
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