THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL
[...] Pride and Glory recalls Street
Kings, another dirty-cop film that came out last summer but Street
Kings made a virtue of miscasting in starring a blank-slate actor, an actor
who could play a loose-cannon lawman not because he looked tough (he didn't) but
because you never knew what he was thinking anyway. His name? Keanu Reeves.
Reeves is perfect casting as the visiting alien in The Day the Earth Stood
Still. "This body will take some getting used to," he muses of his
human-looking shell, and Keanu himself looks like he's still getting used to his
own body, moving stiffly and seldom adjusting his face unless absolutely
necessary. The film is a remake, the alien in the 1951 original having been
played by Michael Rennie a sober, faintly dull British actor who specialised
in cops and doctors; Reeves adds something more, his air of spaced-out Zen
serenity. Alas, the film is feeble, lacking everything from visual coherence to
memorable characters. It doesn't even make much sense.
The alien ("Klaatu") in the original came to Earth to deliver a warning: 'Live
peacefully or else', a fitting Message for the early years of the Cold War.
Keanu in the remake also claims he wants to "reason" with humanity, but in fact
he's come as an executioner. The decision to destroy human beings has already
been taken; he's just here to pull the switch to "begin the procedure",
collect animal species for future preservation in a Noah's Ark scenario, then
scorch the rest with an army of killer bugs that destroy everything in their
path. He has no reason to be hanging out with tasty scientist Jennifer Connelly
and her truculent stepson (Jaden Smith), much less allow himself to be taken
prisoner by the US government. Rennie in the original deliberately set out to
live among humans, the better to try and understand them, but here it's just
dumb luck that Keanu finally realises with the bugs about to wreak havoc
that we may be "a destructive race" but we also have "another side". Phew, talk
about a narrow escape.
Speaking of human destructiveness, the film doesn't make clear what exactly the
problem is, or how humans are supposed to "change". Global warming is presumably
the culprit, but it's never spelled out unsurprisingly perhaps, in a film
that's made by a large corporation and features a prominent plug for McDonald's
and no practical suggestion is made for how we can improve (the coda gets rid
of electricity altogether, which just seems quixotic). Eco-issues are confused
with simple aggression, so for instance the boy's father a soldier who died,
presumably in Iraq has infected him with a fearful, kill-the-Other philosophy
(the official response to Klaatu is also to fight rather than talk). It's easy
to walk out of Day believing its only Message is that we should all be
laid-back and gentle, like Keanu Reeves.
Does it matter? Yes, because it speaks to a lack of nerve. Day doesn't
dare offend by being too 'environmental', just as it doesn't dare make Keanu a
killer (when he kills a cop, he immediately brings him back to life). The film
is destroyed by vagueness, just as director Scott Derrickson's staging is vague,
often leaving out key information. We don't see the giant sphere land, it just
lands (only at the end is there a master-shot). We don't see Gort the robot
emerge, he just does. We don't see the soldiers surrounding him with metal
plates, they just do (then the plates slam shut). We don't know why our heroes
have to meet in a (highly symbolic) graveyard or indeed anywhere, since Klaatu
can just stay put and the others can come to him.
Maybe I'm asking too much. Day the Earth Stood Still isn't exactly
teeming with holiday cheer it's a film about the end of the world, after all
but it's clearly designed for Christmas audiences, tired and supine after a day
of shopping. Its a lie-back-and-gawp-at-the-special-effects pageant, not a
serious movie. Critics demanding eco-Messages should probably back off or, to
quote one of the cops in Pride and Glory: "Calm down, it's the fuckin'
holidays!".