“I am leaving soon, and you will forgive me if I speak bluntly. The universe grows smaller every day, and the threat of aggression by any group, anywhere, can no longer be tolerated. There must be security for all, or no one is secure. Now, this does not mean giving up any freedom, except the freedom to act irresponsibly. Your ancestors knew this when they made laws to govern themselves and hired policemen to enforce them. We, of the other planets, have long accepted this principle. We have an organization for the mutual protection of all planets and for the complete elimination of aggression. The test of any such higher authority is, of course, the police force that supports it. For our policemen, we created a race of robots. Their function is to patrol the planets in spaceships like this one and preserve the peace. In matters of aggression, we have given them absolute power over us. This power cannot be revoked. At the first sign of violence, they act automatically against the aggressor. The penalty for provoking their action is too terrible to risk. The result is, we live in peace, without arms or armies, secure in the knowledge that we are free from aggression and war. Free to pursue more... profitable enterprises. Now, we do not pretend to have achieved perfection, but we do have a system, and it works. I came here to give you these facts. It is no concern of ours how you run your own planet, but if you threaten to extend your violence, this Earth of yours will be reduced to a burned-out cinder. Your choice is simple: join us and live in peace, or pursue your present course and face obliteration. We shall be waiting for your answer. The decision rests with you.”
—Michael Rennie, The Day The Earth Stood Still, 1951
Jennifer Connelly: I need to know what is happening.
Keanu: This planet is dying. The human race is killing it.
Jennifer Connelly: So you have come here to help us.
Keanu: No, I didn't.
Jennifer Connelly: You said you came to save us.
Keanu: I said I came to save the Earth.
Jennifer Connelly: You came to save the Earth from us.
Keanu: We can't risk the survival of this planet for the sake of one species.
Jennifer Connelly: What are you saying?
Keanu: If the Earth die, you die. If you die, the Earth survives. There are only a handful of planets in the cosmos that are capable of supporting complex life.
Jennifer Connelly: You can't do this.
Keanu: This one can't be allowed to perish.
Jennifer Connelly: We can change. We can still turn things around.
Keanu:: We have watched. We have waited and hoped that you would change.
Jennifer Connelly: Please.
Keanu: It has reached the tipping point. We have to act.
Jennifer Connelly: Please.
Keanu: We will undo the damage you have done and give the Earth a chance to begin again.
Jennifer Connelly: Don't do this. Please, we can change. We can change.
Keanu: The decision is made. The process has begun.
—The Day The Earth Stood Still, 2008
The original Day The Earth Stood Still is one of the best SF movies ever made. It kept things simple, had both intelligence and clear purpose—one of many obliquely stated analogies for the global pissing contest with the Soviets—and managed to be fantastically entertaining. It's probably the best picture Robert Wise ever directed, and he directed a lot of good ones. It's one of a handful of perfect movies, one that really didn't need a remake.
Of course, in a world where Psycho was remade—and not even that many years into the current (re)cycle—no picture is safe. So it was that The Day The Earth Stood Still's number “won” the remake lottery.
Now, as previously stated, there are occasionally legitimate reasons to remake a movie. One is having a go at fixing the flaws in an interesting but imperfect picture, but remaking a better movie can make sense as well. In the case of The Day The Earth Stood Still, the Michael Rennie version had Michael Rennie land on Earth and be like, “The Cold War and nuclear escalation will kill you all, and unless you desist, I shall be forced against my will to show you how unpleasant aliens can be.” In 1951, that was the main threat to humanity and the planet Earth, nuclear chess between the U.S. and the Soviets. By 2008, the Soviets were no longer commies, and despite Putin's nostalgic autocracy and frequent “suck on this” gestures directed at Washington, no longer the primary antagonist for the U.S.
Interestingly, the remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still recognizes who America's primary antagonist is: ourselves. The alien who comes to earth with his giant phallic robot this time around has come not about nuclear war, but our willfull ecological destructiveness, which in light of the oil diarrhea in the Gulf of Mexico, is very relevant. Whaddaya know? A legitimate reason for this remake to exist. Guess we can put this on the select list of remakes that are worth a shit, right?
NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!!! Looks like you're not getting our cash prize, but take this home version of our game and a complimentary set of steak knives.
See, if you're gonna remake a picture like The Day The Earth Stood Still, you need to recognize that a big part of what made the original great was the quiet dignity of Michael Rennie in the lead. Quietness and dignity are not qualities we see a lot of these days, but there's one guy who could have killed shit in an intelligently written re-imagining of The Day The Earth Stood Still.
David Straithairn, ladies and gentlemen. Quiet. Dignified. Capable of rocking the house to its knees as an alien. One of an incredibly short supply of actors capable of intoning the classic phrase “Klaatu barata nikto!” without looking like a twat. Sure he's not a movie star, big effects movies don't need A-listers anymore, and often do better without them. There you go. Layup. But no. Fox decided, in the face of intelligence and good business sense, to go full retard.
I defend Keanu, more than I should arguably. He's held it down in a lot more of his movies than people give him credit for, and on one level it makes perfect sense to cast him as an alien, because he kind of is. But not here, dude. Despite Keanu's ability to not suck, the times when he doesn't do not hinge on his intelligence to seal the deal. Klaatu needs to be intelligent, otherwise the whole shithouse goes up in flames.
This was but one blown decision in this creative process, however. The supporting cast would have been fully capable of covering for Keanu (containing no fewer than two Oscar winners, John Cleese, Don Draper, James Hong, and incipient megastar Jaden Smith) had the script not been composed of the kind of feeble-minded shit you hear in stoned “philosophical” discussions freshman year of college. Dialogue is not dialogue, but sparring matches between two clunkily articulated philosophical viewpoints. Character relationships require half a scene to explain (why Jennifer Connelly couldn't have just been Jaden Smith's mom is a case in point: his dad is dead and we never see him . . . so why couldn't Jennifer Connelly have been married to a black guy? Our fucking president is biracial, people, come on).
The single biggest swing and miss though is that Keanu lands on Earth having already decided to fuck shit up. Michael Rennie got here and said, “All right, ladies and gentlemen, let's discuss this like civilized beings.” Keanu hops out of his UFO, telepathically melts everyone's central nervous system on some “I . . . am an F . . . B . . . I . . . agent!” trip, and basically acts like a dick. The whole movie from like the twenty-minute mark onward consists of Jennifer Connelly urgently pleading with Keanu to change his mind. In spite of all that, it takes Jaden Smith being precociously charismatic for Keanu to decide, “Brah . . . I'm going to spare Earth! Whoa!” So the whole fucking movie, ultimately, is a gigantic waste of an hour fifty, as Keanu's grand solution seems to consist of frying all the technology on earth, thereby basically making The Day The Earth Stood Still an unofficial Mad Max crossover/prequel.
Then there's Kathy Bates. The point that the leaders of Earth are supposed to be shitheads is a strong one (because the vast majority of them are). And the point that presidents don't often call all the shots is a stronger one. But these points are blown to shit by writing her character as a one-note swipe at Hillary Clinton. I've gone back and forth on Secretary of State Clinton over the years, and I'm glad Barack's president instead of her, but she's intelligent, capable, and her heart's in the right place. The fact that she's not a size 2 and her hair being occasionally unfortunate have nothing to fucking to do politics, and the way she rhetorically .12 gauges anyone who fucks with her is actually a good thing for a politician. Do I like her? No, but I respect her. The tendency to paint her as a fuckhead autocrat is unfair (and reductive, intellectually feeble, sexist, etc etc), and Kathy Bates' character in this movie is one of the dumbest bits of Hillary pastiche yet seen in pop culture. Just like David Straithairn should have played Klaatu, change Regina Jackson to “Reggie Jackson” and give everyone a good laugh by casting James Rebhorn.
THIS MAN CAN PLAY AN EVIL WHITE GUY IN A SUIT BETTER THAN ANY AMERICAN ALIVE, GODDAMMIT. PUT HIM IN MORE MOVIES.
Final verdict: stick with the original. Stick with Michael Rennie. And someone find Jennifer Connelly's agent and throw him down an elevator shaft: the only good movie she's been in since her Oscar was The House of Sand and Fog, and that was seven fuckin years ago.
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