Day the Earth Stood Still, The

Keanu Reeves is an alien come to judge the human race, Jennifer Connelly the female scientist lodging an appeal. Remake of the Cold War sci-fi classic from the 1950s
With their superior technology and enlightened cosmic wisdom, some aliens are too liberal to be entertaining. Here Keanu Reeves plays Klaatu, member of an intergalactic manager class, who comes to deliver a stern warning to the leaders of mankind: stop polluting the Earth or else we will wipe out your ignorant souls to save the planet. Unfortunately some trigger-happy grunt wings Klaatu and he is spirited away by the American administration before he can deliver this message to the world. So begins The Day The Audience Sat Stiff With Boredom. Some scientists are on hand, snatched from all over the world into one super-brainy team. Maybe the army don't know which button to press for a conference call. There is no time to read the manual as an asteroid is heading for Earth. It will impact upon Manhattan in minutes. The scientists are told that they have not been gathered together to stop the asteroid - it's too late for that - but to help with the aftermath of the impact. A cold-hearted if laudable aim - so why dispatch the super-brainy team in a helicopter to the very location the asteroid is about to hit? The Day The Earth Stood Still is a "reimagining" of a celebrated 1950s B-movie and is angling for some of I Am Legend's box office action. Unfortunately the film has none of I Am Legend's intensity or action, playing like an inert 'X-Files' episode with far too much weight put on the role of the cute kid, here played by Jaden Smith (son of Will and Jada Pinkett Smith). The cute wise kid seems obligatory for Hollywood apocalypses (see Dakota Fanning in War Of The Worlds and Charlie Tahan in I Am Legend). Children represent our hopes for the future, so it is dramatically useful to have them hanging around when you are dealing with a bleak scenario. But let's face it, children aren't much use when you're on the brink of the end of the world. When they've grown up, perhaps. In the meantime, let's see the adults actually pulling their finger out and doing something rather than waving a cute child at the problem and hoping it has a conscience. Global warming is not going to be stopped by a boy sticking his finger in a leaking dyke. In the original Day The Earth Stood Still, a flying saucer landed in Central Park and a figure in a spacesuit emerged, the mysterious Klaatu. In an era of Cold War anxiety, the aliens were invaders come to threaten the American way of life. But Klaatu was not some bug-eyed Russkie. He was an outer space liberal-fascist who would very much like it if we could all just get along but is prepared to exterminate us if we do not. Just as the Terminator was a role that played to Arnold Schwarzenegger's weaknesses, so Klaatu's emotional distance plays to Keanu's limited range: he regards humanity much as a middle manager considers his staff in a downturn: as a collection of people he is vaguely fond of but now, regrettably, must let go due to their own shortcomings. Keanu's Klaatu wants a meeting with the UN to discuss mankind changing its ecologically devastating behaviour. Instead he ends up on the run with Jennifer Connelly, forced to stop off at various product placement opportunities to chew over exposition. He is driven around in a nice silver Honda, encountering LG phones and finally, in a note of utter capitulation, meets an alien sleeper agent in McDonald's. Why not set the whole film in McDonald's? The Day McDonald's Stood Still. In fact, why not make the alien spacecraft an enormous floating Big Mac. The bun could flap away like a mouth, delivering platitudes about being a carbon-neural intergalactic burger while we all boil to death. The combination of greenwash and pansy-waisted Ivy League liberalism reaches retching point about midway through the film when Jennifer Connelly takes Keanu/Klaatu (was he cast because of the similarity in names?) to meet John Cleese. John Cleese is a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who listens to Bach. Despite hacking into all human communications, the aliens have never heard of Bach - but then iTunes is pretty good at protecting copyright. A few minutes in the donnish atmosphere of Cleese's beautiful home goes some way to convincing Klaatu that maybe humanity is not so bad after all. All that's missing is a scene where Klaatu leafs through a copy of the 'New Yorker' and goes hey, we don't have refined prose like this in on my planet. The clincher is when John Cleese says to Jennifer Connelly, "Change his mind. Not with reason but with yourself." And you wonder if she is going to have to shag Klaatu to save us all. But there is to be no girl-on-alien action because Klaatu is not merely an outer space managerial liberal-fascist: he is also Jesus. There is a long line of outer space liberal messiahs, from E.T.'s kindly botanist to Kevin Spacey's strung-out Prot in K-PAX. Klaatu mixes the Jesus stuff with his pragmatism - resurrecting a man he killed because he was an impediment to the plan. Our technocratic rulers must be cruel before they can be kind. So many disappointments, so little time. Let's go for a list. Jon Hamm, who plays Don Draper in 'Mad Men', looks unshaven and tired - why take the most ruthlessly dapper man on television and slob him up like that? Secondly, for reasons unknown, we do not see the American President or Vice-President throughout the film. All their decisions are taken by proxy through Kathy Bates. Call us naive but surely the end of the world is the one time you wouldn't be delegating. And then we come to Gort, the iconic big robot who inspired the Cylons of 'Battlestar Galactica'. Instead of Gort lasering and smashing stuff with a vengeance, he turns into a flying cloud of devouring robotic locusts. Straw poll: would you rather see a giant robot lasering and smashing, or a bunch of nanobots eat stuff atom-by-atom? Thought so. Although this is a one-star movie down to its boots, one aspect of the farrago couldn't be helped: the credit crunch. Klaatu's big trick is to stop all the machines of the Earth. But, as we now know, he doesn't need superior alien technology to do that. An over investment of astro-dollars in the sub-prime housing market would have ensured the manufacturing and consumption cycle ground to a halt anyway. Who needs a giant robot? The footage of the stock market in turmoil due to the alien landing brings a grim laugh: maybe they should have reimagined The Day The Earth Stood Still as The Day Aliens Called The Humans Upstairs And Told Them They Were Letting Them Go.
Verdict It's not good enough, at this point in the game, to serve up this collection of cliches and expect anyone to be fooled or entertained by it for a minute.