Saturday, December 13, 2008

Film review: The Day The Earth Stood Still

The Day The Earth Stood Still @ IMDB

You have to feel sorry for Keanu Reeves. I'm sure if you total up the box office totals for his films he'd be enormously successful. Bill & Ted, Speed, The Matrix, these are big big films. And he gets no respect.

One might say he was the new Steve Guttenberg.

But at least Guttenberg knew his place, he pretend he was anything else other than a B-Grade actor who got lucky with some of the roles he was cast in. He didn't star in remakes of 50s Sci-Fi films and pretend that they were anything else than throwaway tosh.

As you might guess, this is a remake of the 50s classic which tells the tale of an alien called Klaatu that comes to Earth in order to warn the human race about their destructive ways. Only, instead of being about the Cold War like in the original, this time it's about man causing the ecological destruction of Earth.

How topical.

On the plus side, it looks good. They have kept the design of Klaatu's robot bodyguard similar to the original so no issue there. The initial half an hour or so of the alien craft landing is great, that sequence should have it's own film*.

It just doesn't hang together after that. We get that Klaatu is meant to be this emotionless, distant character but he's too distant. There's nothing there to hook us in as the humans are pretty dumb as well.

What we have is the basis for a really good film but it's not this one. Must do better, all round.

In a word? Stationary.


* In fact there is one, it's called Close Encounters of The Third Kind. Look it up.

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