The Day the Earth Stood Still (Scott Derrickson 2008)
Posted on January 12 at 18.59, 2009 by Eric Mahleb
The Day the Earth Stood Still is a pathetic film. As I much as I love Hollywood for its mystic, history, glamour and for the fact that it continues year after year to enable the creation of marvellous films, I also sometimes hate it for being able to not only green light such trash but also for purposefully creating in the first place such a non-sensical and emotionally deficient waste, tailored to please the common denominator, thus totally disregarding in the process good acting, scene plausibility, intelligent dialogues and well developed characters. I won’t even get into the dishonour a bad remake does to the original film upon which it is based, in this case, one of the best Science Fiction films of all time.
Stiff Keanu Reeves as the stoic Alien already tells us that we are embarking on a risky adventure. Some might see a certain logic in casting someone who does not know how to act (although once in a while Reeves is capable of raising his acting to the level of ‘enjoyable enough’ as in The Gift (2000)) for the part of an alien who supposedly does not initially understand emotions, but I would rather classify this as bad and naïve casting. Or more likely as marketing-based casting. After all, Brad Pitt, who has since shown that he is capable of good acting in such films as Kalifornia (1993), Fight Club (1999), Snatch (2000), 12 Monkeys (1995), The Assassination of Jesse James (2007) and Burn after Reading (2008), proved through his horrid performances in Interview with a Vampire (1994) and Meet Joe Black (1998) that playing blasé and stoic characters (as well as an Austrian character in Seven Years in Tibet (1997)) is not the stuff of average actors.
With the addition of the money-driven and inappropriate casting of Keanu Reeves, The Day the Earth Stood Still also boasts an impressive list of clichés, issued straight out the bad blockbuster manual: the racially mixed infuriating child who will do the most maddening things at the most inopportune moments but who, as even the average viewer will have guessed from the start, will finally overcome his emotional issues and become only slightly less annoying; the bright and single mother who has problems raising that irritating little…mentioned earlier and who seems to know all the right people since she will become the main point of contact for the alien (someone in this whole disaster of a production still had enough good sense to ensure that she does not end up falling in love with the alien); the know-it-all and closed minded politicians who will of course make all the wrong decisions; the beyond repair and impotent military establishment which, as usual, will find bigger and bigger rockets to throw at the problem; the good, tolerant and just scientists who, if it weren’t for the politicians and military, could make the world a much better place; and last but not least, the alien who is so intelligent that, after some small, uninteresting and morally infantile chats with a couple of people, discovers the meaning of emotions and realizes that humans are not such a bad lot after all. My son is 19 months old and has an EQ far superior to the level of this film.
In comparison to the relevance of this film to contemporary environmental issues (its superficial message that we are killing our earth and its ending that seems to lightly suggest – and this was not made very clear - that stopping all technology is the answer to these issues, are an affront to the problems we truly face), Emmerich’s The Day after Tomorrow (2004) seems like a scientific treatise, which of course does not say a whole lot about Hollywood’s ability to take these issues seriously.
I am a lover of great cinema but also of great cinematic trash. This, on the other hand, is bad trash and as such deserves every single bit of negative press it has so far received. In the meantime, I shall pull out the 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still from my DVD shelf for a little trip down nostalgia lane…
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2 Responses to “The Day the Earth Stood Still”
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Outlander - Cinema, Sci-Fi, Futurism, Technogaianism and other banalities by Eric Mahleb Says:
February 18, 2009 at 21.01[...] What makes Outlander better trash than for example Eagle Eye (2008) or The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) is that it does not pretend to know how to deal with big philosophical questions and it does not tie its story to the ‘real’. By releasing itself from the shackles of reality, that is, by taking place in a fantasy world, Outlander does not have to meet the stricter believability standards of films that relate to our modern society. [...]
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Wanted - Cinema, Sci-Fi, Futurism, Technogaianism and other banalities by Eric Mahleb Says:
March 9, 2009 at 15.31[...] A regular topic on this blog is that of bad versus good trash. What makes, for example, Eagle Eye (2008) and The Day the Earth Stool Still (2008) bad trash and what makes Wanted good trash? Why are the cliches acceptable in the later but not in the first two? Even though there are many reasons why a film can be bad, there is however usually one overarching common reason: bad trash films tend to take themselves seriously and try to reach emotional and intellectual heights that are far beyond what they can achieve based on the resources available (such as skills and intelligence of the director and actors and quality of the screenplay). There is nothing more annoying than directors who have no understanding of their abilities and who end up inserting childish and immature emotional and philosophical nonsense in their action flicks. Good trash, on the other hand, tends to know its limitations and has the intelligence to try not to pretend that it can be more than what it actually is. [...]