The Day the Earth Stood Still

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll admit that I had been looking forward to this movie.  I’m kind of a sucker for sci-fi/end of the world movies and I still have a crush on Jennifer Connelly dating all the way back to 1991 when she played Jenny Blake in The Rocketeer.  When I first saw the trailer, The Day the Earth Stood Still looked like it had a lot of potential: slick F/X, a good enough cast, and it’s a remake of one of the defining films of the sci-fi genre.  But, like so many times before, Hollywood figures out a way to get me in the theater only to disappoint me.  Damn you, Hollywood, why do you treat me this way?!

I’ll start with the little things that made my brain hurt from watching this movie.  First up, Keanu Reeves.  He was awesome as Neo in the Matrix movies (even though you can pretty much skip Reloaded and Revolutions), but other than that, his acting style is to say “whoa” in nearly every movie and look good doing it.  And yet I was able to appreciate that he was the perfect choice for this role.  An alien who takes on a human form in an awkward manner and shows little to no emotion or any type of inflection in his voice?  Really, Keanu Reeves is your only choice there.  The character development in this flick was pretty much non-existent.  Every character, Reeves and Connelly included, were just there to move the paper-thin plot along.  They tried to give Connelly’s character some depth by having her be constantly concerned about her stepson, but it felt so trite I just didn’t care what happened to the little kid.  I know that might sound harsh, but seriously, he got on my one big nerve pretty much every scene he was in.  As for the slick special F/X?  That only applied to the sphere that landed in Central Park.  Everything else looked way too fake, especially Gort, the giant silver guardian of the sphere.  A note to filmmakers: if your going to give the middle finger to things like plot and character development, at least make the special F/X look incredible.  I’ll still think your movie sucks, but I’ll tell people that the special F/X were pretty cool.  That's the best consolation I can give you.

But the biggest reason I disliked this movie, hands down, was the preachy nature of the message of the story.  Yes, it’s true, a movie this crappy had the nerve to try and tell the masses how to conduct themselves.  If you have any interest in seeing this (and really, why would you?), then stop reading here.  The reason Earth has been visited in this film is because we’re about to have our planet taken away from us because we haven’t taken very good care of it.  Apparently there are only a few planets in the universe capable of sustaining complex life according to Klaatu (Keanu Reeves), and therefore we need to be exterminated in order to save the planet.  Well, hey, all thanks to you, makers of The Day the Earth Stood Still.  I had no idea this planet was in peril, but now I do thanks to a shitty, sub-par, barely worth my time or money re-make that will be forgotten quicker than the time it spent in theaters.  They went so far with it, they had Jennifer Connelly’s character driving a hybrid vehicle throughout the whole thing and they made no effort to hide.  In fact, they shove it in your face for pretty much the entire length of the film.  When you consider that the original was sort of a response to the Cold War, it's understandable that they chose something timely and topical to focus on once again.  Understandable, but still unacceptable.  I care about the environment just as much as the next guy, but I’m sure not going to learn that lesson from a crap-tastic remake that nearly put me to sleep in the theater.

Captain Cinema Rating: 1 out of 5 stars.