A Review of the 2008 Remake of the Day the Earth Stood Still

The main thought in my mind as I walked out of the theatre after viewing the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still was "why would a studio would place down 88+ million dollars to make a movie where the screenplay wasn't one hundred percent solid". It's a foolish thing to do. Many people have problems with the remake's storyline and seem to be just as befuddled as I am. Did the moviemakers just forget about the audience? Did they forget that even Sci-fi has to be convincing on some level?

The movie opens great. It's intriguing and the special effects are completely awesome. It leaves the inner fan squeeing in excitement to see such creative and innovative fantasy objects on screen. I really liked the idea of the shining, ever moving orb as a space ship and the robot was truly fearsome. It's kind of odd that in turns into little electronic bugs to eat people but even that was really interesting to watch.

The problem comes with the story's second plot point. For those of you not familiar with screenplay structure, almost all movies have two plot points which are points in the movie where the story takes a turn or accelerates. The second plot point is, as the name suggests, the second turning point. It is the event in the story that will lead us to the climax. For The Day the Earth Stood Still, the second plot point was Klaatu (Keanu Reeves) realizing that there was a "good" side to humanity and deciding not to murder the species after all. The problem is that while watching this change of heart I had no idea why he came to this conclusion. The reasoning of the story isn't clear or solid. After thinking for awhile, the best I can come up with is that the leading female character, Helen Benson, is caring for the child even though he's not her own. Through Benson and child's sudden cry fest in the graveyard, Klaatu learns that people are there for each even when it's painful for them. Though he's had plenty of time in the movie to see this beforehand. Even with this line of logic, if it was intended, it wasn't clear from what we saw and I only came to this idea after thinking for about a half hour after the movie was over. It still doesn't quite convince me to not destroy humanity, so I don't see how it would convince Klaatu. It was a puzzling moment in the movie and Klaatu's reiteration of his friend's earlier line of "there is another side to humanity" comes out forced and the seams of the plot become awkwardly obvious. The line on screen appears more like the screenwriter saying "and now the alien will decide not to kill everyone" and then coming invisibly on screen to move a puppet of Reeves's mouth to agree.

There were some other odd moments in the movie too. They were basic things that could have been avoided easily. Professor Branhardt (John Cleese) seems to appear from nowhere. He's just suddenly there in one scene. When they come to the professor's house, at first I thought Benson had taken the boy and the alien back to her house. Then Clesse shows up and so I assumed that this must be her father or someone living in the house that we just missed earlier. It's not until after the scene when there's finally a pull back shot of the house that I realized we were somewhere else entirely. Perhaps I missed a spot, though I'm fairly certain I didn't, as I was in the theatre and it's hard to miss information passed on by ten foot screen in a dark room. Some introduction of Cleese's character before hand would have made him seem less like he appeared from thin air to utter out the philosophy of the movie to Klaatu. There is also a character, Michael, who takes Benson from the government's custody. He exists for a few minutes and then dies. He seems to have been created as a way to explain how Benson gets to the cemetery to meet with Jacob (her stepson) and that is all. His purpose ends and he conveniently dies in a car crash.

The ending of the movie was unsatisfying. In the last scene of the movie, all the cars top and the electricity shuts down. All with no explanation as the alien has just left. It seems like they just wanted to throw in a reference to the original but didn't bother with logically tying in into the plot. There's no telling whether the effect is permanent or not. So, Klaatu's actions are basically saying "sure I'll let you live, and you have a good side but we really don't trust you so we're going to cripple you by taking your power supply and destroying your entire way of life". Thanks a lot Klaatu. I felt there needed to be something to provide more closure.

So overall, the effects were great and the first three quarters of the movie were fantastic. The last quarter ran into some plot problems and became unconvincing and lacked closure at the end. The logic of the plot should have been made more solid before embarking on such an epic movie. This is something that truly confounds me. Why would anyone make an epic without a one hundred percent stable story line? About ninety percent of the reviews I've read express the same confusion over Klaatu's decision that I felt. I can't see a way that the moviemakers couldn't have seen the potential problems with this. I suppose then they must not have cared and figured it was okay to waste a remake.