The Day The Earth Stood Still

[stusegal]

About a year ago I asked if I was alone in my outrage of the remake of this great movie. (see the original post).

After comments from some of you I changed my position, as someone pointed out that even though the original movie was well done and had a great message, the age and relative obscurity of the movie meant it simply wasn't being seen by younger people. Point taken. So I for the last year have anxiously awaited the new movie.

And now I've seen it.


First of all let me say . . . . .the new movie is very entertaining, with great special effects.  The two hours just zipped by.

In many ways the plot is very similar to the original. Alien arrives from another planet in an exotic "spaceship", brings along awesome unstoppable robot, tries to communicate with world leaders, is shot by over-zealous military, there's an irritating little kid, etc. etc.

SPOILERS FOLLOW!!

But there are some elements of the movie that are very disappointing:

• First of all, the plot of the original was about our ability to commit nuclear mayhem on ourselves and others - and the aliens' ability/responsibility in not allowing that. This plot is about the aliens stopping us from destroying the earth through our irresponsible ecological practices. Am I really supposed to believe that aliens would care that we are trashing our planet?
• Then there's the title of the film, which represented a scene in the original movie where the alien flexed his muscles by showing his power - stopping everything on earth for an hour. Well, there was a scene near the end of this movie where everything ground to a halt, but it was completely unconnected to the plot, and never explained.  Anyone who hadn't seen the original movie would be clueless about this scene.
• In the original we learned to purpose of Gort, the robot. Not mentioned in this movie - just a big scary robot.
• Then my real problem - they didn't seem to know how to end the film. About 15 min. before the end, the alien (who was heretofore going to wipe out all of humanity and its' creations) observes a tender bonding scene between the female lead and the kid, then the alien "gets" that humans are, well . . . human, and decides not to destroy the planet  -  even though they had spent 80 years setting up the infrastructure to destroy the planet and repopulate it with indigenous life forms excluding humans.   Puleeeze!

So my evaluation is - - - - if they had named the movie something else, and had come up with a decent ending,  I would have really liked the film.  But as a "remake", I'd say . . . . re-watch the original.
 

Comments

[lauriemann.livejournal.com]

I thought from the trailer that this movie was ludicrous, so I never planned to see it. Jim and Leslie were going to go until the movie got slammed by every critic on Friday. They went to see Bolt instead.

The effects looked interesting, but the plot and much of the acting looked really bad.

[stu-segal.livejournal.com]

This actually was a pretty entertaining movie, though the end was stupid and un-climactic. It would have been better if they stressed this was adapted from the original screenplay, rather than have folks think it was a remake.

And hey, it was immeasurably better than the most-aggravating-and-worse-science-fiction-movie-I've-ever-seen, the Tom Cruise remake of "War of the Worlds".