The Day the Earth Stood Still.

"These days, if there's a go-to movie star for handsome-but-expressionless, it's got to be Keanu," writes Jonathan Kiefer, and to fully appreciate the assertion, you need to read his first two paragraphs, a breezy introduction to the Kuleshov Effect:

Plus, as history has shown, you put him in a straight black suit, hook him up to some electrodes on occasion, liken him both to Christ and to a fish out of water, and he'll hold that camera's attention like - well, like the Earth's standing still. Call it the Keanu effect.

Updated through 12/15.

That's right: I am saying that the cheesy new Keanu Reeves remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, however utterly unnecessary and half-assedly realized and anticlimactic it may be (quite, it's fair to say), is also, in fact, a model of the true and absolute essence of cinema. I am offering a way to really appreciate this film, if only you can open your mind.

"The problem with this new The Day the Earth Stood Still isn't so much in the execution of director Scott Derrickson, who pulls off quite a few compelling sequences and, best of all, doesn't screw around too much with Klaatu's giant robot Gort (at least until Gort suddenly turns into a cloud of tiny robot insects that arbitrarily eat whatever the plot calls for)." Luke Y Thompson in the Voice: "No, the problem here is that there are no big ideas: The original Day was both a condemnation of Cold War military paranoia and an allegorical Christ tale, with Klaatu dying for our sins before being resurrected and ascending into the heavens, warning that he'll be back with the apocalypse if humanity doesn't shape up. There are plenty of ways to bring similar themes into play here: Klaatu as Bush figure, perhaps, invading because of our weapons of mass destruction?"

"As a time-traveling high school dude in the Bill and Ted movies, Keanu Reeves blazed a path through the great expanse of Western civilization, with detours to heaven and hell for good measure," writes Dennis Lim. "In the Matrix trilogy, he was Neo, the One, the hacker turned messiah who uncovers the underlying reality of our reality. More recently, in A Scanner Darkly, Richard Linklater's rotoscoped adaptation of the Philip K Dick novel, he played a drug-addled narc who slips among identities with the help of a high-tech 'scramble suit' and brain-frying hallucinogens. Reeves now continues his career-long tour of the otherworldly by assuming one of sci-fi's most iconic roles."

Meantime, you'll have likely heard that Keanu Reeves has signed onto 47 Ronin, evidently more of a retelling than a remake, with an emphasis on fantasy and, of course, action. Michael Fleming reports for Variety.

Back in the Los Angeles Times, Geoff Boucher on the slew of upcoming remakes of sci-fi classics.

"Hollywood is still in thrall to its sci-fi Golden Age screenwriters of the 1950s, some of whom were not hacks, but talented writers on the studio payroll." FilmCatcher's Damon Smith, too, looks ahead to that round of remakes.

Patrick Barkham talks with Jennifer Connelly in the Guardian.

Glenn Kenny revisits the original: "Watching the film today, one can conceivably mourn both the cozy-looking past of the American 50s and the never-to-be realized future that Klaatu represents."

Update: Eric Kohn passes along a see-to-believe press release.

Updates, 12/11: "Mushy-headed pap about love's indescribable majesty and busy, amateurish landmark-destruction sequences... are the predictable, guiding order of this Day," writes Nick Schager in Slant. "As for Keanu, the actor proves he's got a mean blank stare, which is no more exciting than a bare wall and yet still more compelling than the pitiful computer-generated effects used to create Gort, a rubbery creation that seems weightless, cartoony, detached from his surroundings, and thus part of a different film. If only he were so lucky."

Felecity Barringer reports in the New York Times on a recent screening at the California Institute of Technology: "They came because they were interested in seeing if the movie got the science right (mostly yes, the experts agreed), and if professed worry about climate change is influencing scripts (sort of), and if it is true that movie scientists have a higher risk of mortality than those in other celluloid professions (yes, one study says)."

The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw: "The Hillary-a-like defence secretary in The Day the Earth Stood Still [Kathy Bates] is a queasy throwback to the 90s, when we saw loads of Bill Clinton facsimiles on the big screen: attractive-ish, middle-aged white commanders-in-chief who were very much in the Bill mould, and flatteringly cast in romantic action-hero roles.... So will there be a surge of Obamas in the cinema? Maybe. But I suspect that there are plenty of people in Hollywood who will think that whatever's happened in the real world, in commercial and entertainment terms, a black president is still too 'urban' an idea."

"The entire spectacle could be easily confused with some ghastly, Roland Emmerich-produced hybrid of Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow - only more skilled at product placement than plot development." Neil Morris in the Independent Weekly.

"It's a religious impulse, perhaps, this desire to be visited by some colossal vision, illuminated by some transcendent Word, chastised and threatened with awesome punishment. There's a desperate longing for oblivion blended deftly into this entertainment." Josef Braun on the original.

Online browsing tip. Dan Kois presents "Vulture's Complete Field Guide to the Facial Expressions of Keanu Reeves."

Online listening tip. Ambrose Heron talks with Derrickson.

Updates, 12/13: Day "must be the worst major release in what may be the most disastrous year in recent Hollywood history," writes Richard Schickel in Time.

"Honestly..., I wouldn't care about the tacked-on ecology lesson if the movie were any damn good," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "Unfortunately, The Day the Earth Stood Still is a jumble of spare parts and leftover dialogue, as if it had been assembled out of unused bits of every movie where an unknown whatzit threatens our way of life and the government goes into full institutional pants-crapping panic mode. I don't even mean E.T. or Close Encounters, although there are dim echoes of both to be found here. More like Outbreak or the TV version of The Andromeda Strain or that movie where Bruce Willis collides with the Earth."

"What did poor [Robert] Wise do, incidentally, to deserve such treatment?" asks Alonso Duralde at MSNBC. "His chilling horror masterpiece The Haunting was already put through the meat-grinder with an effects-heavy 1999 remake, and his thriller The Andromeda Strain was revisited with ill results in a SciFi Channel re-do earlier this year. What next - a hip-hop reinterpretation of The Sound of Music? (Granted, Queen Latifah could totally tear up 'Climb Ev'ry Mountain,' but still...)"

"After WALL•E and I Am Legend and the dozens of apocalypse flicks since the last Day the Earth Stood Still we can surely do better," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Even Klaatu looks bored and distracted, much as he did back when we knew him as Neo."

"[I]t lacks the courage of any convictions," argues Tasha Robinson at the AV Club; "the crisis that brings Keanu Reeves (smartly cast as a robotic, almost-emotionless, only-sorta-human construct) to Earth is laid out in the vaguest possible terms. For a film that takes so much joy in the minutiae of military weaponry and response, the new Day the Earth Stood Still is irritatingly broad and mumbly about why the human race might need to die."

Ellen McCarthy profiles Connelly for the Washington Post, where Ann Hornaday argues that Day is "not a complete failure."

"As a flashy big-budget distraction, Stood Still is adequate overall - rarely above, occasionally below - and often familiar in its spectacle. As a remake, it's equal parts missed opportunity and half-hearted update. Neither is worth standing up for, and the sum total is barely worth sitting still for," writes William Goss at Cinematical, where Eugene Novikov lists the seven "Best Sci-Fi Remakes."

Joe Leydon:

The muddled remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still is pretty lousy - you can read my Houston Chronicle review here - but I must I admit that, while enduring a press screening earlier this week, I found myself fascinated each time Kathy Bates appeared on screen as an aggressively authoritative US Secretary of Defense. Throughout this lavish but lumbering "reinvention" (yeah, right) of the 1951 sci-fi classic, Bates's Sec Regina Jackson more or less single-handedly commands all branches of the US military (and the combined police departments of, oh, I dunno, maybe three or four states) in an all-out campaign to kill or capture the stolid extraterrestrial (played, stolidly, by Keanu Reeves) who's threatening to save the Earth by annihilating earthlings. It's not that Bates gives such a great performance. (Chalk it up as just another grab-the-paycheck turn by another under-employed Oscar-winner.) But I couldn't help wondering: Why is the Defense Secretary giving all the orders while the unseen President and Vice-President hide out in undisclosed locations?

"[S]tupendously dull," declares the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "The lights are on at the top of the spaceship, but there's no one at the controls." Xan Brooks is just as disappointed, but says so via video.

"This contemporary remake of the science-fiction classic knew what it was doing when it cast Keanu Reeves, the movies' greatest stone face since Buster Keaton, as a perplexed alien whose first words on Earth are, 'This body will take some getting used to.'" Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times: "When you want distant and disconnected, Reeves is your man."

"Why couldn't Al Gore have directed this instead?" asks Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York.

"Though it's as full of political and historic subtext as any genre film ever made, you don't have to understand any of it to appreciate the 1951 original version of The Day the Earth Stood Still," writes Bob Westal at Bullz Eye. "The first major Hollywood film to posit a benevolent, if also authoritarian, alien visitor, is best known as the source of eight of the most memorable nonsense syllables to ever emanate from Hollywood: 'Gort! Klaatu barada nikto!' But its DNA has infected vast sections of the sci-fi universe, influencing innumerable friendly alien movies, including Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. and The Iron Giant."

Update, 12/15: "The new Day is just as didactic as the old one while lacking all of its fun," writes Josef Braun.

Posted by dwhudson at December 10, 2008 10:55 AM