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So soldier on I must. If we accept that horror and science fiction stories often reflect the times in which they are crafted, then this new Day the Earth Stood Still is as useful a primer on the anxieties of America at the turn of the 21st century as the original was for the '50s. Let no one say that this Day does not tap into concerns about our potential inability to avert global environmental catastrophe. But from The Amazing Colossal Man to The Stuff to Hostel, the low road through genre is littered with efforts that effectively captured a sense of the zeitgeist while still being awful works of art. Add this redux to those shameful rolls; Derrickson and screenwriter David Scarpa mean well, yet their film gets lost inside its own blunt sermonizing.
Thing is, Robert Wise's original film was about as subtle in its anti-nuke pacifism as a blackjack to the skull. It also had a sprightly sense of pacing and a solid balancing act between earnestness and unpretentiousness in its favor. Flash forward fifty-seven years, and suddenly it's not enough to entertain while edifying - the audience must be hectored and harangued by a film that possesses the gravity of a Merchant-Ivory film. We can't offer entertainment - we're too busy trying to save the fuckin' world, man! So Klaatu comes to Earth in the form of Keanu Reeves. Global warming and general human obstinacy is his concern this time around rather than nuclear proliferation, and it's up to a dewy-eyed scientist played by Jennifer Connelly, along with her obnoxious stepson Jaden Smith, to convince him not to leave this planet as an uninhabitable smoking crater. The filmmakers have given the film a conscience, but they've forgotten to also give it a heartbeat.
Then again, they could just be trying to match the exasperating implacability of their lead actor. It seems appropriate that a role notable in its original incarnation for its impossible-to-miss allusions to Jesus Christ would be tackled by Reeves, who judging from his resume has a hard-on for Christ figures to match Mel Gibson's. Yet an alien is just an alien when you strip away the metaphor, and the fact of Klaatu's origin has inspired Reeves to forgo even the few human emotions that he can comfortably portray in favor a gray, even blankness. His unemotional tone, measured speaking pace and rigid facial expressions is presumably meant to project an eerie, unearthly calm far removed from the tumult of human experience; instead, it merely suggests that Reeves has gotten into a bad batch of muscle relaxants. His refusal to let anything pass through his unchanging exterior blunts the character arc of Klaatu and leaves a great sucking void in the film's center.
Connelly, an exorbitantly expressive actress, attempts to bridge this gap but gets shunted off into a terrible subplot about Jaden Smith's resentment of her and his unresolved grief over his father's death in Iraq. If Reeves's performance wounds Day, Smith's kills it stone dead every time he opens his mouth. The fault is not entirely his; the character is an amalgam of every loathsome trait of movie-brat kids, so a certain insufferable quality seems unavoidable. Yet the young Smith plays it with an irksome cockiness that seems inherited from his father rather than earned by his own as-now-limited talents. Give him time and he might grow into it, much like I fully expect Dakota Fanning to some day grow into her disquieting sense of self-possession, but for the time I would rather not have to endure his whiny, mumbly attempts at expression. Making this grating performance the emotional fulcrum of the film just seems foolhardy.
If there's anything that works in this Day, it's Klaatu's doomsday weapon Gort. Derrickson and Scarpa have rethought the nature of Gort, transforming it into something unexpected and altogether more threatening than the faceless robot of the original film. If the bulk of the film can be summed up as a distaff road movie, with Reeves, Connelly and Smith driving hither and yon to avoid the authorities who would prefer to not have Reeves running around without at least knowing his motives, it can also be seen as a buildup to the spectacle of Gort finally doing his thing. While the other characters in the film drive and blather and argue, Gort stands impassively, occasionally neutralizing whatever threats to his well-being the Army cares to throw at him. When his power is finally unleashed, it's an effectively hideous vision of apocalypse and the only point where the film's relentless dourness feels earned rather than imposed. Yet it's telling that this version has to resort to wanton destruction to drum up tension where the original used dialogue and human drama.
So to the surprise of nobody, The Day the Earth Stood Still is bad cinema, bad sci-fi and bad remaking. Derrickson's film does have one thing going for it: It's marginally better than the other major environmentally-minded cautionary tale to open this year, M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening. Anyone who's seen the latter film knows how little that means.
- Steve Carlson (0 comments)