Friday, December 12, 2008

Movie review: The Day the Earth Stood Still

The filmmakers left out one key element. And added in a slew of product placements.

By John P. Meyer

Heck, I'm not the least bit bitter about the fact that I wasn't invited to the press screening for The Day the Earth Stood Still. Not bitter at all. No way!

(Like Hell I'm not!)

It was probably an administrative error on the part of the distribution company's local media rep. Or maybe the email notification they sent along to me was lost in cyberspace.

(Yeah, SURE it was.)

Just to spite them (in case it really WASN'T a mistake), I went to see the movie anyway. Speaking as someone who really, really likes the 1951 original starring Michael Rennie and Patricia Neal (but mostly starring the cheesy period special effects and - more than anything or anyone else - the genuinely eerie out-of-this-world theremin-laden score by the great Bernard Hermann), this new iteration is a major disappointment.

I'm reminded of what guest programmer Frank Miller said on TCM the other night when Robert Osborne asked him what he thought about plans to remake High Noon. Miller said (without employing any profanity whatsoever, I'm pleased to report) that those interested in doing remakes should limit themselves to movies that were bad to begin with, and keep their hands off films that came out really right the first time.

Here's the chief thing that Fox did wrong in making the new version, and you may have already guessed this on the evidence of the trailer: THEY TOOK AWAY THE ORIGINAL MUSIC, those bastards! Really, the idea of trying to remake this film without using the Bernard Hermann score is tantamount to serving up bean dip without any chips to scoop it up with. It's like showing up for a gunfight armed with a knife. While Tyler Bates' new music is certainly serviceable, there's nothing of genre-defining creepiness about it: it just can't compare.

If they couldn't get the rights to the original score, they simply shouldn't have made the damn movie. (But they did, anyway. BOO!)

What director Scott Derrickson and scripter David Scarpa have ended up delivering is like a watered-down version of The Day After Tomorrow but with none of the epic resourcefulness that made that movie more than your basic exercise in special effects. When the hapless humans in this pic realize their jig is well and truly up, it pretty much boils down to "let's ask that alien guy for help, he fixes everything!"

The movie starts with an interesting prologue involving an early 20th century mountaineer in the Karakoram who encounters something even weirder than yeti tracks, then transports us to a present in which astronomers have noticed something sinister about the path of an interplanetary body that's approaching Earth. (i.e., it's zeroing in on New York City.)

From this point forward (with a few cleverly-conceived, hardware-based exceptions) anyone who's seen the original movie can follow the plot chapter and verse - the big difference being that this time around, the aliens could care less about our nuclear capabilites, but are heavily concerned with what we're doing to the planet in a long-term environmental sense. That's right: they're the Green Police, and they're not about to let us continue down our global warming path to self-destruction. (Because other sentient civilizations might make better use of our rare salubrious ecosystem, if provided with the keys to the planetary kingdom.)

Keanu Reeves (as Klaatu) makes for a very effective alien: he is, after all, a citizen of Canada. Teaming up with Jennifer Connelly (who remains one of the most attractive and beguiling women in cinema) in the role of astro-biologist Helen Benson, the two reluctant earth-bound companions attempt to outmaneuver Homeland Security and the combined armed forces who are hell-bent on blowing up anything they can't understand, on the off-chance that their feeble projectile-based weapons might actually save their asses this go-round. (Yeah, right.)

Accompanying Klaatu and his scientist-babe earth-guide is her annoying son Jacob (Jaden Smith, who acts annoying with considerable aplomb). Jacob splits his screen time between demonstrably missing his deceased father and hurling monkey wrenches into his mother's saving-the-world machinations at every opportunity: a good spanking (administered to Jacob, I mean) might have cut the film's 103 minute run-time down considerably, as Klaatu would have been able to shut down "the process" before things got really out of hand.

But if that had happened, we would have missed out on one of the very clever hardware-based updates to the original movie, which involves what GORT gets up to when he becomes royally pissed off. (Take your diamond drill and shove it, meat-based life-forms!)

A fairly early indication of this movie's turkeyhood status arrives via the appearance of rather overt product placements, including in-our-face big-screen imagery of devices produced by Microsoft (touch-screen computer displays), Citizen (watches) and Pioneer (a radio in the petro-hauling truck that's destroyed while in transit by "the process"). There's even a scene where Klaatu meets up with a deep-cover pal of his - under the Golden Arches, thanks very much and biggie-size it, if you please.

Along for the paycheck are Kathy Bates as a bluff-and-bluster-heavy Secretary of Defense; John Cleese as Professor Barnhardt, who vets Klaatu for evidence of genuine superintelligence; Kyle Chandler as a cowardly government functionary; and Robert Knepper as a one-dimensional "shoot everything that moves" colonel in command of an ill-fated tank brigade.

In a final reaming of its distinguished source material, the scripters don't even manage to work The Words into their screenplay. You know the ones.

My advice to those on the fence about seeing The Day the Earth Stood Still: stick with the classics.

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