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CB'S POV/ Klaatu: The Voyage Home (The Day the Earth Stood Still)

Posted by Cranston on December 14, 2008 at 11:32pm in MOVIE REVIEWS

—or An Inconvenient Truth 2: I Told You!In the original The Day the Earth Stood Still, an alien delivers a message to the people of Earth: Want to nuke each other? Knock yourselves out. Want to take it off planet? We’ll knock you out. Coming at the beginning of the Cold War (and six years after the close of World War II), this message may have been appealing. Sixty-odd later, it sounds like an interstellar version of the Bush Doctrine. (Think about it: this was only six years after the first nuclear test, almost a decade before anyone would put anything in orbit. The Voyager spacecraft, launched thirty years ago, are just leaving the solar system now. Talk about “preemptive deterrence…”)With a visual style that’s half Spielberg and half X-Files, this remake does something almost unheard of in Hollywood: a “reimagining” that actually does not suck. Major props to screenwriter David Scarpa for giving props to Edmund H. North’s 1951 screenplay and the source material, Harry Bates’ short story “Farewell to the Master.” Nods to the original are cleverly woven through the new film and one of the original’s allusions is more fully realized this time around—quite literally. Most impressive, the film has a message without being preachy, and it has something really unusual in almost any film, what Roger Ebert describes as people at least as smart as people you meet in everyday life.As much as I liked this film, I do have a few quibbles:
  • The special effects were good, relatively low key in keeping with the original, but some of the CGI seemed more intrusive than necessary.
  • As cool as the 2008 model Gort (here, GORT) is… I still kinda like the ’51 model.
  • The portrayal of the military is problematic: I don’t think even the current administration (for the next… six weeks, is it?) would be quite this trigger happy.
  • There is a launching point for a possible sequel!
And there are a few plot inconsistencies that I had to explain away, but none worse than those in the original. I recommend this movie highly.

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