Monday, Dec. 15, 2008

'Day The Earth Stood Still' will be better on TV

By Edward Robertson, atomictown.com

Attention would-be alien overlords:

Stop thinking you can just pop down on Earth and start telling us all what to do.

No, I won't put my pants on. No, we won't stop killing each other; how else are we going to impress girls when wit, charm and our rippling bodies fail us? And get off our case about not wrecking up the planet. It's ours. We paid for it. If we want to leave our dirty dishes in the sink and our sweaty laundry in the Amazon rain forest, that's our business. Look, we didn't ask to be evolved, all right? So why don't you let us make our own mistakes and get back to stealing our candy-coated peanut butter?

Like discovering the secret of life, the universe, and making corn stalks fall down in pretty patterns qualifies them to hand down life lessons from their awesome spaceships. If the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still is their alien propaganda, which it is, maybe they should figure out how to make decent movies before they start thinking they can boss us around about how to lead our grueling existence.

Earth is in trouble: an unknown object is zipping through the solar system, and its trajectory is on a collision course with our planet. With mere hours until impact, a team of scientists is rounded up to help deal with the calamity, among them astrobiologist Jennifer Connelly.

Instead of obliterating the planet, the object lands peacefully in Central Park (favored home of monsters everywhere). It disgorges an alien, who is shot, taken into custody and treated, where it morphs itself into a human form (played by Keanu Reeves).

Secretary of Defense Kathy Bates orders Reeves interrogated. Connelly, rebelling at this harsh treatment of man's first contact with the stars, instead helps him to escape. But this might not be the smoothest move: Reeves is here as part of a plan to wipe out the Earth-destroying human race, and there may not be anything we can do about it.

As long as The Day the Earth Stood Still is about planet-smashing meteors that turn out to be aliens with unknown intentions -- roughly its first half -- it's not so bad. With enough momentum, a story can make up for its characters being dull and its dialogue unexceptional.

Once the movie turns out to be about a genocidal alien who spends all his time on Earth/our future grave getting chased around by cops and giving vague explanations about what bad little boys we are, that's when director Scott Derrickson (of the immortal Hellraiser: Inferno, no less than the fifth-best Hellraiser there is) runs into trouble.

Feature-length chase scenes work when that feature is The Bourne Ultimatum. When it's an ostensible morality tale where the alien not only has a towering robot but the ability to control all electronics and also raise the dead, the local cops' efforts to stop him are just silly, especially when they go on for no fewer than eight real-time days (seriously, I counted). The climax looks epic, but it's about as powerful as a butterfly with a hangover.

And between its glowy spheres, seamless, 80-foot-tall mechano-men, and tanks blasting the bejesus out of everything, it certainly looks good. It also makes the excellent choice of casting Reeves as the affect-free alien, the part he was born to play. Too bad all the other characters, with the exception of a domineering Kathy Bates (she could break my legs and keep me confined to a bed for months on end any day), are as light on human personality as the movie's big message is on insight.

But what can you do? Don't say "make a better movie"; nobody likes a smart ass. The Day the Earth Stood Still was built to be shown edited for length on cable TV: it looks cool enough to grab your attention, but if you come back late from a commercial break, you can be sure you didn't miss anything worth seeing.

Grade: C+