The Day the Earth Was Killed

...That could be the title for the new Keanu Reeves sci-fi bomb of the season. It's really a remake of the Robert Wise directed The Day the Earth Stood Still. In the original, Michael Rennie played an extraterrestial emissary sent to warn Patricia Neal of the dangers of nuclear war, and included a dazzling love triangle between Rennie, Neal, and Gort, the robot*. Gort seemed menacing enough, at least to anyone who couldn't run faster than 2 miles per hour and didn't have a mirror handy to reflect Gort's death ray.

The new one replaces the original chestnut of a story with the premise that a bunch of aliens have decided that trees are sentient and that humans are the planet-wide equivalent of canker rot. This of course means that humans must go.**

The original trailer was a bit... well, awfully dull, considering that it includes scenes of stadiums and buildings dissolving like Ovaltine in hot milk. So they've spruced up the footage and released a bevy of trailers in advance of the December 12th opening. I don't have the footage, but I do have script excerpts!

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Excerpt - Trailer 1 - The Day the Earth Stood Still

Regina Jackson (Kathy Bates): This is our planet.
Klaatu (Keanu Klaatu Reeves): No, it is not.
Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly): You're going to destroy us all. It's unfair!
Klaatu: No, it is not.
Professor Barnhardt (John Cleese): There's a giant robot outside. Is it yours?
Klaatu: No, it is not.
Mr. Wu (James Wong): Someone double-parked a Corvette in my spot. (To Klaatu) Is it yours?
Klaatu: No, it is not.
UPS Guy (Alex Winter): I've got a package for a Mr. Ted Logan. (To Klaatu) Is that you dude?
Klaatu: No, it is not.
UPS Guy: It's addressed to "The alien in the examination room."
Klaatu: No, it is not.
UPS Guy: It's a ray gun.
Klaatu: No, it is not.
Gort (Danny DeVito): Pick up the stinkin' ray gun you pansy. It's your job to destroy the earth.
Klaatu: No, it is not.
Helen Benson (Patricia Neal): Gort, Klaatu Barada Nikto.
Klaatu: No, it is not.
Gort: I got your Barada right here, baby.
Borat (Sasha Cohen): It's nice!
Klaatu: No, it is not.
Darth Vader (James Earl Jones): The force is strong with this one.
Klaatu: No, it is not.
Tomaso (Harpo Marx): (Horn noise)
Klaatu: No, it is not.

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Excerpt - Trailer 2 - The Day the Earth Stood Still

Lush string music. Klaatu is holding an oak sapling in his arms.

Narrator (Alec Balwin): He came from another world. She came from this one... but their love was beyond human understanding!

Klaatu (Keanu Reeves): (Running his hand through the leaves of the sapling) I won't let them cut you down, baby!

Narrator: Danger was everywhere.

Dramatic music - Scenes of lumberjacks, sawmills, unpainted furniture stores, toothpicks, Euell Gibbons

Narrator: Even their friends couldn't understand

Gort (John Tesh): She's too young for you Klaatu! She's only a sapling!

Narrator: Nothing could stop them. Not even a planet.

Klaatu: I'll save you, even if I have to destroy the world!

Romantic music - CUT TO

Atomic explosion.

Narrator: See it with someone you love.

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Excerpt - Trailer 3 - The Day the Earth Stood Still

Narrator: For centuries human beings have believed they were alone in the stars. Then, mankind began to speculate about the possibility of life on other worlds. Finally, one calm summer day, they suddenly realized that they were no longer alone.

Dramatic music swells up - CUT TO -

Massive explosions - ships sinking - buildings collapsing - the Eiffel Tower crumbling - tornadoes - tidal waves - more explosions - cars crashing in a demolition derby - Evel Knievel crashing on his motorcycle - cyclists crashing in a bicycle race - a guy balancing plates slips and crashes - an old woman slips on a banana peel - a cat on a table slips and falls off - Soupy Sales takes a pie to the face

Narrator: The Day the Earth Stood Still!

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Excerpt - Trailer 4 - The Day the Earth Stood Still

Two men are sitting, facing each other across a desk.

Man (Michael Palin): An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.
Klaatu: No, it is not.
Man: Yes it is! It's not just contradiction.
Klaatu: No, it is not.
Man: Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes.
Klaatu: No, it is not.

Etc. etc...

UPDATE: Faced with sagging reviews the producers come back with a current events ad, in an effort to seem hip.

Robert Mugabe: Zimbabwe is mine!
Klaatu: No, it is not.

* The eye contact the cyclopsian Gort made with Neal was sizzling... literally.
** The source for the movie is reputedly Eric Pianka's Cookbook of the Damned.

Naive Knaves

A remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still is due for a December 12 release. That the producers chose to release the film on 12/12 is about the measure of the meager cleverness I personally expect from the film.

The original was a creepy, anti-nuclear war polemic that successfully combined a sense of foreboding menace with 50-era sci-fi aesthetics and a reasonably, if superficially intelligent veneer. It was the best thing Robert Wise did, including West Side Story.*

The politics were friendly enough, as I've yet to locate a person on the planet actively in support of widespread nuclear war. Can you imagine someone twittering about, saying things like, "Oh yeah, I actually think there's not enough radiation in the atmosphere. A few hundred mushroom clouds might do us a bit of good. Get the blood boiling, if you know what I mean."

Well, the producers of the new version of The Day the Earth Stood Still might just fall into this category. Given that the adverts tend to focus on shots of large buildings being blown into ashes and aeroplanes crashing into things, it plays like an Al Queda recruiting film with premier league production values and celebrity cameos.

Apparently, there's also some environmental message to the film. It's hard to tell though because the adverts seem to imply that the entire planet, trees and all, is getting walloped into dust. It's awfully hard to hug a tree whilst it's being atomized.

Still there is the bit where Kathy Bates says something about Earth being "our planet" and Keanu Reeves, playing the alien** responds, "No, it is not."

Walked right into that one, didn't you Kathy?

Seriously, doesn't this intergalactic, Marmite for brains clod with a Dennis the Menace haircut know anything about the rhetorical difference between residency and ownership, or at worst stewardship? He's supposed to be from an advanced extraterrestial race. Does the acqusition of technology automatcially mean that all sentient communication will be reduced to the level of poorly translated technical manuals?

Hearing this obtuse exchange reminded me of the line in Hamlet:

"How absolute the knave is! we must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo
us."

Perhaps a better writer would have had Bates respond thusly. I suspect the finished screenplay of this film has her snapping her fingers and exclaiming, "You be too clever fur me, super-a-lee-en man."*** There is no way to tell at this juncture, the advertisments leaving us in a very mild state of suspense.

Unless there is much more to the film than meets the advertisted eye (and in most cases of blockbuster Hollywood productions like this there is even less), perhaps the only suitable response to the film comes from one of Mr. Reeves previous works: "Bogus."

*Without the musical numbers, it has all the earthy relevance of The Lords of Flatbush.
** Which means no acting at all was required of Mr. Reeves
*** Although the dialect might be beyond that writer, as it was for me