The Day the Earth Stood Still

The Day the Earth Stood Still

103 Minutes

Director Scott Derrickson, screenwriter David Scarpa (and probably a stable of script doctors), and Twentieth Century Fox (a studio notable in recent years for hating cinema) cannot take full blame for the awfulness of The Day the Earth Stood Still. I must also place the blame on the TV series Weeds.

You see, on Weeds Mary-Louise Parker plays a single mother not unlike Jennifer Connelly in the film I’m actually supposed to write about. The difference is that Parker gets to portray a character with personality and Connelly a thankless cipher. Parker’s Nancy Botwin gets to do such wonderful, unheard-of things like curse, scream, get mad and vomit in shock. Connelly’s Helen Benson gets to deliver dialogue (sometimes two, even three sentences!) and leftover exposition that isn’t delivered by army men, government officials, or her fellow scientists.

Oh, and it’s not like any of them deliver a line with any modicum of human emotion. The world’s about to end due to alien threat, buglike nanomachines are eating everything human in sight and nobody’s getting even remotely cross with one another. As Kathy Bates (the obligatory pigheaded Secretary of Defense) denies Jennifer Connelly the chance to talk to alien Keanu Reeves out of destroying the world, I found myself getting frustrated — not because it’s just so obvious that Connelly is the only person who can save the day, but because Jennifer Connelly is so calmly adamant instead of telling Kathy Bates to fuck herself. To complain about a lack of humanity in a story about how human life is worth saving is not a good sign, is it?

There’s simply not enough science fiction films these days. At first, The Day the Earth Stood Still seems full of promise — an old-fashioned story about aliens and the fate of the world with scientists as the protagonists — not space commandos, not whiny kids with laser swords. Soon enough, the film squanders this potential in favor of being a chase movie. In fact, to call it a chase movie is misleading — that better describes The Island. No, The Day the Earth Stood Still is too mundane for that sort of excitement: in the second act nearly every scene with Jennifer Connelly and Keanu Reeves takes place in the woods or in a Honda Civic, except for a notable exception when Reeves meets an alien sleeper agent at a McDonald’s. Alas, it’s almost 2009 and Battlestar Galactica (where viewers should go if they need a story about humanity and apocalypse) is ending and soon there will be no bastion of sci-fi we can look to for ideas and philosophy in addition to lasers and people with rubber heads. We all know we won’t be getting it from movies anymore if this film is any indication.

At best, The Day the Earth Stood Still feels like an inferior bootleg of Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, right down to the CG-assisted disintegrating and the single parent with an irritating child. The one good thing I can say is that the former has a less saccharine ending, albeit one with implications that no one bothered to think out. The abruptness of the ending leads me to believe that it’s an attempt at a Children of Men style conclusion, but where Alfonso Cuaron brilliantly constructed a world in which the finale is a big question mark on the status of humanity, this film ends with a dash.

There is but one decent scene in the whole thing: to help convince Keanu that humans are indeed worth saving, Jennifer Connelly takes him not to The Pope or The President, but to a fellow scientist specializing in extraterrestrial life. The scientist pleads with him that humanity will only change if it has a chance to overcome this catastrophe. It’s the only scene that feels remotely genuine in the whole ordeal, thanks to the scientist. The actor? John Cleese.

by Danny Djeljosevic