It is not often that we here at Out­side Con­text get to review a movie about an Out­side Con­text Prob­lem!  In cel­eb­ra­tion of the event I am going to review two films with the same name!  The Day the Earth Stood Still 1951 clas­sic & the 2008 remake!

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) is a clas­sic sci­ence fic­tion movie from the 1950’s.  A top example of what I call, “Theremin Sci-Fi,” (A Theremin is the instru­ment that makes that spooky flying-saucer sound) they are usu­ally cat­egor­ised as hav­ing a high drama or what-if storyline com­bined with some sort of cau­tion­ary ele­ment.  Con­sider the excel­lent “For­bid­den Planet,” which con­tained a very strong mes­sage about muck­ing around with ultra tech, “with great power comes great respons­ib­il­ity”.  Most “Theremin Sci-Fi,” are in some way to do with the cold war, such as “Them!” or the equally excel­lent, “Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers.”  The cold war ele­ments focus around the loss of indi­vidu­al­ity of the cit­izen as they are engulfed into a alien col­lect­ive; ideal mater­ial for the cap­it­al­ist versus com­mun­ist dilemma.  TDTESS is often taken as a primar­ily cold-war film and was indeed mar­keted that way.

In fact it is noth­ing of the sort. It is dir­ect allegory of the life of Jesus.

The Jesus fig­ure is Klaatu who has come to our planet to give us a warn­ing about our dab­bling with nuc­lear power.  He is the per­fect dip­lo­mat peace-monger, a man who has no anger, no rage and a kindly char­ac­ter.  All the viol­ence in his soci­ety (or the group of plan­ets he rep­res­ents) is con­tained within GORT; the massive 7 foot tall killer police robot he brought with him, who is entirely indes­truct­ible.  GORT rep­res­ents God as his power is such that, “He could des­troy the Earth”.

Best not get him riled then!

Gort and Klaatu leave with a mes­sage for the faithful.

The ‘priests’ of the story are the world’s sci­ent­ists who have just been wait­ing for some­thing like this to hap­pen. In the story Klaatu hides amongst the humans call­ing him­self “Car­penter,” pro­fesses to belief in “the Great Spirit”, even­tu­ally gets shot, dies and is resur­rec­ted by GORT.  He then ascends to space leav­ing a mes­sage behind in the hands of the sci­ent­ists.  As the screen­writer Edmund North said,

“It was my private little joke…I had ori­gin­ally hoped that the Christ com­par­ison would be sub­lim­inal”.^[7]

It is this alleg­or­ical telling of the Jesus-tale (which after all is time­less) that elev­ates the film to the level of mas­ter­piece.  While the spe­cial effects are not that spe­cial any­more and the cine­ma­to­graphy has been sup­pased, the act­ing and (more import­antly) the story-writing is con­sum­mate.  It earns a very high 8 out of 10.

You can watch the entire film online here : http://www.veoh.com/

or here is the trailer:

So what the hell happened in the remake?

The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)

Firstly, it gets some things very right indeed.  The alien space­ship is mys­ter­i­ous.  It is, in fact, not clearly a space­ship at all, rather a giant globe of light.  I like that a lot.  Secondly, the cast­ing of Keanu Reeves as Klaatu is a mas­ter­stroke.  His wooden deliv­ery – he can act well, just not speak and emote – is per­fect for his char­ac­ter as it is not used to human flesh.  How­ever, everything else is atrocious.

Primary of these is that there is an annoy­ing Amer­ican kid with prob­lems to work out.  This staple of the genre has ruined many oth­er­wise good sci­ence fic­tion movies, such as War of the Worlds, or AI.  Here the child’s rela­tion­ship with his step-mother is used as a plot device to show “human emo­tion” to Klaatu and get him to save us.

Klaatu in this film is very dif­fer­ent.  He is not such a peace envoy from outer space, and he cer­tainly is no Jesus.  Rather he is more like an agent of “Spe­cial Cir­cum­stances”.  His entire per­form­ance is aloof to the extreme, and yet he has appar­ently been given the power to decide the fate of man­kind all on his own.  Think­ing about it, the shape and style of the ship is also very Cul­ture–like.

A dif­fer­ent kind of “Special”

The writers of this film sat down and went through their old film col­lec­tion, rip­ping the themes off one by one.  At first we have the “wild­fire” scen­ario from The Andromeda Strain, which is used to col­lect all the smart people together to sort out a major threat to the planet.  This idea is all well and good in the­ory, but the col­lect­ive only have 76 minutes to react!  How bloody smart do they think they are?  What are they sup­posed to be doing in this time?

The next theme to be rampantly ripped is the mil­it­ary jumping-the-shark and being all knee-jerk about the vis­itor.  I want to send a mes­sage to my lead­ers, “If a being is able to fly here from another planet in a big space-bubble and land without blow­ing any­thing up, THEN HE IS AN OUTSIDE CONTEXT PROBLEM AND FIGHTING WILL JUST DOOM US ALL!”

Don’t drill into the 27 foot tall super-robot!

His­tor­ic­ally speak­ing, as the movie’s Defence Sec­ret­ary claims, OCP’s have led to the destruc­tion of the weaker civil­isa­tion.  Actu­ally, what dooms the so called weaker race is lack of com­mu­nic­a­tion.  Take Cortez’s land­ing in Aztec ter­rit­ory.  This is the clas­sic OCP as Cortez was from Europe and had guns, etc.  Right?  Wrong!  Cortez had 500 men with him.  The Aztec’s had an army of 5,000.  What doomed them was the pre­sump­tion about Cortez that led to them let­ting him into the main­land.  If they had actu­ally talked to him straight away, they would have learned exactly what sort of threat he actu­ally was and simply bashed his head in.  By fear­ing him to be a god they para­lysed them­selves into pat­tern beha­vi­oural think­ing.  By the time he was amongst them he had a large army due to bar­gains struck with tribes on the way and it was too late.

OCP’s need talk first.  Guns are to be con­sidered use­less.  Of course, talk requires the real­isa­tion of this fact and the drop­ping of pat­terned thinking.

In other words: Fear breeds assump­tion and assump­tion is the mother of all fuckups.

When the Wild­fire call really goes out, I hope that I get a knock on my door as what they really need in these occa­sions is a Philo­sopher.  Someone who thinks out­side the box without his brain hurt­ing.  An example of a film that real­ises this is Jur­as­sic Park, where the Jeff Gold­blum’s char­ac­ter is exactly that, albeit with a more funky name like “Chaos Engin­eer” or something.

The next thing that gets ripped off is the mes­sage Klaatu has for us.  His mes­sage is not one of warn­ing, his mes­sage is one of “die”.  He is not here to judge man­kind, the intro to the film makes it clear that the ali­ens have been watch­ing for many years.  Rather he has come here to throw the switch.  You see, the ali­ens don’t rate man­kind over the other anim­als.  I do mean other anim­als, as animal we are, and it is only our arrog­ance that calls us sep­ar­ate.  You know, for a spe­cies to sur­vive into space in the way Klaatu’s has, and for the “group of plan­ets” to have formed into a single gov­erned entity (and they must be gov­erned – as oth­er­wise they would have no need of GORT to police them) then they would have had to develop dip­lomacy just as much as they have astronav­ig­a­tion.  For such a group to send one unarmed guy down to us who lands “nearby” the UN (why not just land right there?), but is help­less for dir­ec­tions and trans­port to the meet­ing, is simply stu­pid.  The ori­ginal Klaatu was a smart guy, and clearly a simple cit­izen of the col­lect­ive.  It was GORT who rep­res­en­ted the dip­lomacy; the dip­lomacy of the iron hand in the vel­vet glove.  Klaatu just was.  In this ver­sion Klaatu can save us if he wants to, and much of the film is about sway­ing this judge­ment, but then the movie takes that away from him by GW order­ing the US mil­it­ary to attack GORT.  Piss­ing off super-beings, cre­ated or not, is never a good idea.  GORT made no threats at all until attacked.  He is just sit­ting there.  There is abso­lutely no reason to attack him!  NONE!  Why the hell are they try­ing to drill into him?

The next thing that is ripped is the nan­otech cloud.

Nan­ites end-of-the-world.  It won’t be fun!

The Grey-Goo end of human civil­isa­tion scen­ario is well known to those who love sci-fi, but if you haven’t heard of it, it goes like this:

Eco­phagy is a scen­ario involving molecu­lar nan­o­tech­no­logy gone awry. In this situ­ation (called the grey goo scen­ario) out-of-control self-replicating nanoro­bots con­sume entire eco­sys­tems, res­ult­ing in global eco­phagy. “Per­haps the earliest-recognized and best-known danger of molecu­lar nan­o­tech­no­logy is the risk that self-replicating nanoro­bots cap­able of func­tion­ing autonom­ously in the nat­ural envir­on­ment could quickly con­vert that nat­ural envir­on­ment (e.g., “bio­mass”) into rep­licas of them­selves (e.g., “nan­o­mass”) on a global basis, a scen­ario usu­ally referred to as the “grey goo prob­lem” but per­haps more prop­erly termed “global ecophagy”.”

It is a bril­liant idea and ripe pick­ings for sci-fi.  How­ever, the fun­da­mental point of nan­ites, is that you can’t see them.  They don’t look like locusts.  I sup­pose this was a veiled bib­lical ref­er­ence, but since the rest of the film has none, I don’t think it very effective.

By far the worst part of the film is the end­ing.  GORT is des­troy­ing human­ity the hard way and in the final moments before the end Klaatu learns what it is to be human.  Empathy comes a bit late, but it comes.

You know, the idea that ali­ens tak­ing on human form sud­denly have all the rush and blood-pumping life of human exist­ence to deal with and that this makes them feel like us is flawed in the extreme.  That feel­ing, that empathy with other humans, is an act of nur­tur­ing from when we were young.  Its like say­ing, “evey­one has a mum”.  Those feel­ings, the shared com­mon­al­ity of them, is to do with the fact we all love our mum’s.  Any alien sud­denly thrust inside a human body would not feel that nur­tured reac­tion when he see’s someone cry and someone hug them.

Love, in other words, is nur­tured not biological.

Sev­eral great films have dis­cussed this issue such as Blade Run­ner, which has the Semi-Robot Nexus 6′ learn human emo­tion through nur­tur­ing each other over their 5 year life-span.

Who is Klaatu nur­tur­ing with?

Give us a cuddle

Judging by Keanu’s flat deliv­ery, no one.  The only per­son with any idea about what to do to con­vince Klaatu to save us is John Cleese, who strangely turns up as a math­em­at­ical sci­ent­ist.  He tells Jen­nifer Con­nelly exactly how to deal with Klaatu, “You must con­vince him with your­self” (nod is as good as a wink to a bind bat).  I remem­ber think­ing he meant for her to have sex with him, which is not such a bad idea.

Actu­ally, I sus­pect that if she had simply given him a blow­job then the whole film would have been over in a minute or quicker.

Pity.

Then in the end, where is “The Mes­sage?”  He is sup­posed to leave us with a mes­sage!  You know, this one.

GHaaa!

The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) scores a 5.  It is essen­tially rubbish.

Regards,

Basho

Trailer:

Keanu talks about the film:

Pop­ular­ity: 8% [?]

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