Movie Review: “The Day the Earth Stood Still”
Keanu Reeves in “The Day the Earth Stood Still”
Rating: 49
Robert Wise’s landmark 1951 sci-fi fable, “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” still plays as a terse warning to Earth’s inhabitants even if GORT the robot looks a little creaky these days. Now, Scott Derrickson’s adrenalized remake offers a sleek, computer-generated GORT, nanotech insects and environmental catastrophe subbing for nuclear annihilation, but beyond the galactic bells and whistles this new “Day the Earth Stood Still” feels frustratingly inert.
When satellites detect a giant ball of space matter hurtling toward Manhattan, Dr. Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly) becomes part of a team of scientists conscripted by government scientist Michael Granier (Jon Hamm of “Mad Men”) to estimate threat and potential damage. What emerges from a glowing orb in Central Park is a shiny alien that is promptly shot by soldiers and then avenged by a giant and obviously CG robot. The alien is hustled away for medical treatment, where he sloughs off what looks like a layer of lutefisk to reveal Klaatu (Keanu Reeves).
Klaatu is clearly part human, the result of some long-ago genetic harvesting, and his purpose is simple: he is there to warn humanity that it does not own Earth, and its continued abuse of the planet comes with a deadly price. But early unwillingness on the part of Secretary of Defense Regina Jackson (Kathy Bates) to give the visitor his requested audience sends the message Klaatu expects: that humans aren’t willing to change, and it’s up to Helen and her mentor, esteemed Nobel laureate Dr. Barnhardt (John Cleese), to convince him otherwise.
“The Day the Earth Stood Still” sets a predictable course for destruction of Manhattan — a place that gets cinematically clobbered far too often — but the real problem comes from a frustrating lack of genuine suspense. Reeves is well suited for alien duty and strong performances from Cleese, Hamm and Jaden Smith as Helen’s son help brighten the action, but “DTESS” should feel like the world veering close to the edge. Instead, it wheezes to an anti-climactic finale when the ending to Wise’s original film felt like an exhausted sigh of relief.
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