Here’s a sign that the movie business will survive the coming year: Friday morning our boss announced we couldn’t afford a christmas party, but just after lunch he impulsively shut down the office and took us all to see THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, and also paid for slurpees. 

On the other hand, the movie itself is a sign that the entertainment business is doomed. 

I’ve long held that it’s folly to remake great classic movies. Most of the time, they’re great because of a combination of elements, often intangible, like chemistry and timing. Better to remake flops that had great ideas behind them. Robert Wise’s THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL benefited from the cold war paranoia surrounding it as well as the fortunate casting of Michael Rennie, an unknown who happened to be the perfect alien. For a while there it looked like they were going to cast Spencer Tracy! And the title was almost THE DAY THE WORLD STOPPED until the producer, at the last minute, decided he could do a little better. So sheer luck played a big part in making the first version great. On the other hand, check out THE COLOSSUS OF NEW YORK some time. It has a lot of the same elements – giant robot, the United Nations, black and white; but it has the added virtue of being awful, so if you remake it you’re bound to do better.

SPOILERS! STOP READING, UNLESS YOU KNOW BETTER THAN TO SEE THE DAMN THING.

The current DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL stars Keanu Reeves as the emotionless alien Klatuu. And while it’s the role he was born to play, it’s not exactly virgin territory for him. Hell, “emotionless alien” is his default style. The new producers make a dozen choices that suffer in comparison to the original, and the biggest mistake is dropping the Christ allegory. What the hell were they thinking? Christ has never been bigger box office than nowadays. You’ll recall that in the original Klatuu goes on the lam and chooses as his alias “Mr. Carpenter.” Then he dies, is resurrected by Gort the robot, and makes a big speech. Sorry for the spoiler here, but none of those things happen in the remake. So Klatuu is a symbol of, what, our guilty environmental conscience?

If you weren’t scared off by that spoiler, I’m going to go ahead and give away the ending.

Klatuu is an emissary of some federation of planets, and they have decided that with so few inhabitable planets available they can’t allow us to ruin ours, so he has been sent to wipe out the human race. But he’s a little on the fence because we’re so gosh darn nice to be around. It turns out Gort the robot is actually constructed of little nano-locusts, and he explodes into a cloud of technology-eating death, spreading across the land devouring trucks and stadiums (stadia, I guess) in its path. At the last minute Klatuu has mercy on the human race and shuts down the cloud, but also puts an end to all electricity. Without technology, man cannot pollute. Happy ending!

There is a huge problem with this ending, even ignoring that it doesn’t resolve any of the lead characters’ storylines, and it’s this: as I pointed out to my colleagues as we trudged out of the theatre, there are going to be a dozen countries devising workarounds to the no-electricity thing before the credits are over. It’s a showy non-solution. Klatuu shoulda killed us all off. In movies, heroes are people with jobs who are better at them than anyone else. Klatuu didn’t finish his job. And if he had, he’d be a villain. So that’s what I’d call a bad choice.

It’s not all bad. In the remake the ship lands in Central Park instead of Washington. Smarter choice, because Klatuu is basically parking so he can catch a bus to the UN, and there isn’t another patch of ground on Manhattan big enough for that giant marble. And the first half hour strikes a pretty good tone of suspense, with smart earnest dialogue that makes you wish they could have kept that up. And of course, Reeves looks good in a suit. How fortunate that the guy he steals it from has a physique like Keanu Reeves!

This is the middle of December, a couple of weeks before a big holiday weekend, and you should be wary of big ticket movies that open now instead of waiting for the prime week between Christmas and New Years. It’s a sign that the studio doesn’t have confidence in the product, that they want to keep it away from the competition. If you want to see a movie with this title, I’d pick up the DVD, Christ allegory and all. 

-daniel k.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 15th, 2008 at 1:17 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.