The Day The Earth Stood Still (2008) – Review

Sometimes all the good intentions in the world can’t stop a project from ending up weirdly dull or somewhat awkward. While remaking bona fide classics was always going to be a slippery slope, sometimes giving an old sci-fi flick a modern coat of paint proves to be an incredibly smart move as you can not only update some creaky visuals, but you can overhaul the overall messages to fit the times. With these factors in mind, the remake of 50s pseudo Jesus metaphor, The Day The Earth Stood Still should have been a home run as modern day earth now has an entire litany of things threatening its very survival that would require an alien to step in an organize a planet wide intervention. However, in practice, things didn’t quite come together as it should and even the sight of Keanu Reeves in a suit once again blessed with otherworldly powers could change the fact that the struggle for the end of the world was surprisingly quite dull.

Scientist Helen Benson has enough on her plate trying to continue her studying, teaching and raising her step child a year after his father passed – however, her to-do list alters violently when a large amount of representatives of the U.S. government show up at her door demanding that urgently go with them immediately. Given no choice but to tag along, Helen finds that she’s been put on a list for the government to call when strange, extraterrestrial shit starts occurring and soon she discovers that there’s a rapidly moving object whizzing past Jupiter thar projected to collide with the earth in barely a under a day and she, and various other egg heads, have been gather to quickly hammer out a survival plan. However, tense panic soon morphs into another kind of stress when this super fast object suddenly changes course and everyone discovers that this thing isn’t a meteorite, but instead is an alien craft in the shape of a huge, wavey sphere when it touches down in Central Park.
First contact seems imminent, but as always some nervous, trigger happy trooper panics and puts a bullet in the side of the alien, triggering it’s towering, robot, cycloptic bodyguard. However, rather than all-out devastation, the alien calls his giant muscle off with a shut down phrase, but as doctor race to save its life, it confounds them all by shedding it’s grey, outer husk to reveal a male, humanoid body. Calling himself Klaatu, the alien seems to bond with Helen but both soon finds themselves virtually smothered by goverment paranoia and mistrust that’s spearheaded by the no-bullshit Secretary of Defence, Regina Jackson.
However, barely veiled threats and suffocating red tape isn’t enough to stop Klaatu and his funky powers from simply walking out of the facility with Helen and her step-son in tow; but even though he claims that he’s come to save the earth, what does that mean for the humans that live on it?

The original Day The Earth Stood Still was an undisputed classic that not only merged messianic themes with typical 50s sci-fi to deliver a timely warning about the rising danger of nuclear war and seeing as things haven’t gotten particularly better, I can fully see why someone would think that giving it a redo would make sense during such troubled times. Even more surprising is that we find veteran horror-meister Scott Derrickson at the helm who has since left epic sci-fi far behind to return to far darker territory. However, while their are a few good things the filmmaker brings to the mix, ultimately his version proves to be a rather bland, if handsome looking enterprise that can’t quite manage to live up to its lofty ideals.
One thing the movie excels in is with its dealings with an utterly unmovable U.S. goverment that manages to ramp up the paranoia to X-Files levels chiefly thanks to the machinations of Kathy Bates beehived Secretary of Defence who proves to be every bit as formidable as the redesigned alien muscle, Gort. Treating virtually everything that occurs as absolute proof of an alien invasion, the woman has the ability to move heaven and earth in a New York minute to keep her country safe, but what’s truly scary is that while her motives are technically just, they also could prove to be just as damaging when honey could be just as effective as vinegar – and a shitload of sodium pentothal. Framing the suit and shades wearing members of authority as inflexible to the point of being harmful helps immensely by trying to get a sense of urgency going and the pivot from 50s fears of nuclear war to a more modern threat of environmental damage may feel like we’re about to get a patronising bout of preaching from Keanu’s dead-pan alien about the damage to mother earth being most bogus, but thankfully, Derrickson trusts that we’re smart enough to realise that total planet decay is a bad thing and manages to stay on-message without wagging fingers. However, when we’re not dealing with an over-reactionary military complex, or some 2008-era CGI that reimagine old school flying saucers as vast, Palantir looking globes that hoover up animals like hovering arks, the rest of The Day The Earth Stood Still ends up being a bit lifeless.

For a start, while Reeves has always cut a mean figure in a suit, you’d think that playing a monotoned, otherworldly visitor would be right up his alley, however, even those big soulful eyes can’t stop Klaatu feeling like a far weaker version of what Jeff Bridges achieved in Starman. Similarly, we find Jennifer Connelly trying to juggle saving the world with raising her troubled step son and while she dies the best that she can, she’s constantly thwarted by the fact that Jaden Smith’s bratty kid is so annoying, he actually puts up a decent case for mankind’s destruction. While I’m not about to pile onto a kid for simply acting out what a script has instructed him to do, it’s an issue that the film simply can’t overcome considering it’s other problems.
To put it bluntly, The Day The Earth Stood Still is yet another example of a 2000s remake that systematically has ironed out all the character and charm that came with the original and the best example of this is the treatment of iconic robot bodyguard, Gort. While the original version was a dude in a wonky robot suit that visibly wrinkled at the joints, it still did the job; however, while Gort 2.0 is reimagined into a giant dreadnought who has the ability to dissolve into an infinite amount of nanobot locusts, the fact that this is a far more logical progression than just a 7 foot tin man blasting shit with his eye beams, it just isn’t that memorable.

It has its good points and it has its bad points, but while the movie may have had enough clout to catapult Derrickson into the position he’s in today, there’s no escaping the fact that this remake is more a case of Klaatu Verata No-no.
The Day The Earth Stood Stale.
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