Review: The Day The Earth Stood Still

This might sound terrible, but I think I felt more excitement watching the "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" trailer before "The Day The Earth Stood Still" than I did watching the film itself. That's not to say the film is bad, certainly not as terrible as many are claiming, but it's just not very good either. It feels as though the filmmakers were trying to sell the 1950s version to a modern audience, but the problem is, they had to either deliver a full reproduction (excluding, perhaps, men in robot suits) or create an entirely new film. What they've delivered is some bizarre in-between.

Brief synopsis of the plot: Dr. Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly) is called one night and pulled out of her home by government officers, forced to leave her son Jacob (Jaden Smith). They cannot tell her why this is happening, because not even they know. A colleague of hers (Jon Hamm) informs her that she's been selected to be part of a special team planning for a strange interstellar object colliding with Earth. However, the object slows down, and lands in Central Park. It's a huge sphere, glowing and appropriately alien, and when a vaguely human form steps out, the military's first instinct (as is the case with movie military) is to open fire on it. The sphere gets angry and sends out a warning, in the form of a giant robotic man.

From there, the Secretary of Defense (Kathy Bates) reaches the conclusion that the aliens are hostile, and Helen has to prove her wrong. The man the aliens sent identifies himself as Klaatu (Keanu Reeves), and he claims to be here to save the Earth, but continually informs the humans that their demise is rapidly approaching and unavoidable. Helen simply tries to convince him that mankind can change its ways enough to warrant not being killed off.

The film is surprisingly slow-burning for an American disaster movie; until about two-thirds of the way in, there is simply a building of somewhat ominous tension, before things start getting disentegrated and/or blown up in the third act. The film's best scene, and also its most compelling, is when Helen brings Klaatu to a Nobel Prize-winning friend of hers (John Cleese), who does not beg Klaatu to spare humanity, but simply sits down and debates its merits with him, as though they were discussing a scientific theory over tea.

Reeves is not horrible here; any actor could play this role, as he simply has to remain emotionless, and it just so happens that he's played this role too many times before for there to not be a little bit of parody present. Connelly is good as always, though she has that most thankless of disaster movie roles, the constantly weepy female lead. Smith is probably the star performer in the film here, playing an embittered boy who understandably has issues with the strange alien driving around with he and his stepmother. If anything, when the inevitable acceptance of Klaatu by Jacob rolls around, it's a little too abrupt; Klaatu essentially stops him from tripping and falling, and that seems to change the whole game.

Oddly enough, the film pulls off the "global warming as apocalypse" angle far better than a film I enjoyed considerably more, "The Day After Tomorrow," but within that comparison lies its greatest flaw. "Tomorrow," for all the grandiose special effects and melodrama, had a certain humor about its situation, and you never forgot that it was above all else a Hollywood production. At times, while watching this film, I felt almost like I was watching a documentary of something that did not happen, and not in the good "Cloverfield" sort of way. The film is so matter-of-fact that even when tiny aliens are ripping Giants Stadium apart, there's no sense of mirth or wonder, just apathy.