The Day the Earth Stood Still: I watched them

Richard and I watched the original on Netflix via our 360 (which I've only mentioned once how great that is, and it's worth mentioning at least an additional 2 times how great it is) and then we watched the remake in IMAX--where you don't watch movies, they happen to you. I'm probably more inclined to notice pore size than most people but...gibblies.

In 1951, Klaatu comes to Earth to "encourage" us to submit to an interstellar police force of robots programmed to locate aggression and punish it. The civilizations on other planets were unconcerned while we were aggressing each other to pieces with spears and bows and arrows and guns and cannons and grenades and tanks and bombs and bombs and bombs, but when we started making rockets that can breach our atmosphere, and bombs that can destroy an entire planet, the aliens got a little hot under the collar.

In 2008, Klaatu, still named Klaatu even though it sounds kind of 1950's scifi silly--many of the names of the original main characters were the same, I suppose as homage, but the characterizations were so different that it felt a little bit like the filmmakers were trying to get bonus points for their awareness of an original version in a really winky, elbow-nudgy way--comes to Earth to deliver an ecological warning. Although, I'll admit I'm a little fuzzy about this.

In the original, Klaatu eventually delivers his message to the greatest scientists in the world, so we know what it is. In the remake, Keantu speaks with a fellow alien in a person's body who tells him that humans are a destructive race and resistant to changing, and Keantu decides (quite comically in some kind of Chinese, I think) that he'll have to kill us all. So what was that original message he wanted to deliver to the UN? "I'm going to speak with another alien and then decide whether or not to kill you. So make sure you wear clean underwear tomorrow."

Eh. This is one of the problems with the remake. The plot is updated in ways to make it more "realistic", but still tries to follow the old plot, and is then jimmied to make the special effects fit in. Don't get me started on the special effects by the way. Gort was a 10 foot tall robot in the original that was obviously a person in a shiny suit filmed in clever perspective, but at least looked like a tangible thing that could fit in a reasonably sized spaceship. In the remake, G.O.R.T. (a military acronym used in such a way that I felt as though I had been shown a tongue, watched as it was placed in a cheek and then marveled as it was illuminated with Christmas lights) is a 4 million foot tall (approximately, I think) robot that is clearly computer animated and not part of the world the actors live in. I'm not sure if the spaceship was enlarged to a giant shiny globe to fit G.O.R.T. or G.O.R.T enlarged because they had space in the globe, but I would guess that the decisions were made in conjunction with each other. As in, "How can we make the movie look more awesome? Bigger robot! Bigger spaceship! Tiny silver bugs! Explosions! Dissolving trucks! Magic electric powers for some reason! Ohhhh, ohhhhhhh yeah. Don't, don't stop!"

Our threat to the safety of the Earth is a bit more tragic and relevant than our threat to aliens deduced by virtue of Washington's threat to Moscow, but it still felt trite. Like the message of Pocahontas was extrapolated to a scifi action movie. How high does the sycamore grow? The answer is not as cool as scorpions migrating to giant glowing globs, but if you cut it down, then you'll never know.

I wasn't enraged by the remake's shortcomings, though. More bemused. And I think it will be an excellent Saturday afternoon movie on TNT. One more thing worth noting. Helen Benson, the woman who shows enough common sense, sympathy, and understanding to help Earth by helping Klaatu, was a regular secretary in the original. Proof that a regular person was capable of these qualities. In the remake, she is an extraordinarily well-educated scientist--completely skirting the issue of whether or not someone like a secretary or insurance salesman would be able to act like a humane human in extraordinary circumstances.

Oh well.