I saw updated version of The Day The Earth Stood Still the other day. It was tolerable, but just tolerable. This time, aliens come to earth to warn the pesky humans to take better care of the earth! No warnings about being so warlike (as in the original). The spearhead of this effort is Klaatu (Keanu Reeves), whom the directors/producers cleverly made an alien who is “born” into human-form, thus in one swoop explaining away his incredibly wooden performance!
Jennifer Connelly gamely tries to save the movie, playing Helen Benson, a xenobiologist (can’t remember her real title) of sorts who is brought on board by the U.S. Government to study Klaatu. Realizing that the gov’t sucks, she helps Klaatu escape and they run around trying not to get caught while Klaatu explains to Helen that the best way to clean up the earth is to destroy it. Well not quite true. Just destroy all the humans and other living creatures on the planet. But don’t worry, they collected a few samples so they can reseed the planet afterwards!
Yes, the best the super-intelligent, super-capable aliens can think of is to destroy the Earth to save it. What are we, in some sort of strange Viet-Nam era paradox? The reasoning is strange: our planet is one of the few capable of supporting complex life. Humans are mucking up the earth. Thus, humans must die. Of course humans might be considered the most complex form of life on the planet. Sentient and all that. So what is the point to killing all the humans? So that some other creature can evolve to be intelligent and probably also come close to destroying the environment so that the aliens can destroy them too? So what is the point of “saving” the planet for complex life?
I think the method of destroying the earth was chosen so that they could employ some computer animation people and do cool scenes of semi-trucks being disintegrated or a football stadium being disintigrated by the pseudo-nanotechnological equivalent of locusts. The things actually had wings! It seems like it would have been a lot easier to simply create a virus that would make everybody sick and die. Of course, you could create a virus to reduce fertility rates so that the population declines and not just wipe out every living thing on the planet! Or… I could spend much more time picking apart the movie and the ludicrous plot, but I’m on a lunch break and have to get back to work!
I thought most of the acting was pretty decent. Everybody acted like they were in a good movie. Too bad they weren’t! And really, its not like the movie made we want to stab my eyes out or anything. It’s just a dumb movie.
Watch this movie late at night when nothing else is on! 3/10