The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)
Directed by Scott Derrickson, starring Keanu Reaves & Jennifer Connelly
Screening in cinemas Connelly
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
Directed by Robert Wise, starring Michael Rennie & Patricia Neal.
The classic 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still may not be a great movie, but it is certainly a very interesting one — and many times better than the recently released remake starring Keanu Reeves.
Released in the midst of an anti-communist witch-hunt in Hollywood, the film used a science-fiction story to criticise the madness of a nuclear arms race that guaranteed the destruction of humanity.
The film begins with a human-like alien named Klaatu who emerges from a UFO that has landed in Washington, D.C. In a very tense moment, he takes out a gift to hand to a human and is shot by a nervous soldier — an unsurprising outcome of knee-jerk US imperialism and a Cold War hysteria that sees diabolical threats in the most mundane places.
After being treated, Klaatu refuses to talk to the US leaders readily available to him in Washington and demands to address the leaders of all countries — a slap in the face to anybody who thinks the US has a God-given right to rule the world.
"It's not that easy", he is told. The Russians demand the meeting take place in Moscow, and the British demand it be in London.
"You have to be patient", he is told. "I'm impatient with stupidity", he responds, denouncing all the imperial gesturing as "childish jealousies and suspicions".
In another scene, a group of humans are sitting around the dinner table talking about the alien arrival. "If you want my opinion", says one, "he comes from right here on earth. You know what I mean" — implicitly suggesting that he is a communist and ridiculing what must have been all-too-common dinner conversation at the time.
It is moments like these that give The Day the Earth Stood Still a lasting appeal. In fact, it is the depth of the McCarthyist hysteria of the period that gives this material some dramatic impact.
The Day the Earth Stood Still has what may now seem like a fairly mainstream liberal message — world leaders should work out their problems through the United Nations rather than raise the stakes with an arms race. But it needs to be remembered that the when the film was released the anti-communist hysteria was not over — shortly after the film was made, Sam Jaffe, an actor who portrayed a scientist entrusted by Klaatu, was blacklisted and did not work again for seven years.
This material is ripe for a remake in the current political climate and with today's far more advanced special effects. Unfortunately, the people behind the new version have stripped the film of its political insights.
A number of fine actors are given nothing interesting to do. Keanu Reaves as Klaatu is stony-faced and dull — the faceless, voiceless robot Gort in the original film is far more interesting.
Instead of demanding an end to nuclear armaments, Reaves's Klaatu has come to eliminate the human race before it has destroyed the Earth. However, rather than play up the real threat of climate change in an exciting way — like The Day After Tomorrow, for example — it's just a minor point to explain why Klaatu is destroying everything.
Without an overarching theme that gives some insight into the state of our world — or a reason to care about Klaatu's mission — the new version of the film becomes just another disaster movie, and not a very good one at that.
The original Klaatu's quest to explain his message and understand the human race creates many moments of suspense and even comedy.
Whether the human race decides to accept Klaatu's demand is never resolved in the original film, which is an open-ended challenge to humanity to save itself.
It may seem odd that the original Klaatu represented peaceful alien civilisations that threatened humans with annihilation if they did not also accept peace, but his threat was really a metaphor for nuclear weapons themselves.
If you are looking to see a clever sci-fi movie, save your money and rent the original — whatever its faults, it is far more entertaining and enlightening than the update.
[Abridged from http://www.socialistworker.org.]