The Day The Earth Stood Still

[StevenRichardsRules]

Anyone seen it yet?

[E-C-Bub]

wait for DVD. Sucked so bad.

[GhostMachine]

I read the spoiler for it at the Movie Spoiler site (obvious URL), and it sounds like total shit. It never should have been made, because the original is a classic and they changed WAAAAAY too much. The aliens' motivation sounds like garbage, and if they had done a somewhat straightforward remake Keanu would have been horribly miscast. (You'd need someone more distinquished, like Ralph Fiennes, to play Klaatu in a straightforward remake)

(The original The Day The Earth Stood Still is my mother's favorite science fiction movie of all time and is in my top 5)

I advise you to skip this and go rent the original instead. Or go rent the original if you sat through the movie and haven't seen the original.

[Crybaby Bunting]

As part of my films studies course I had to watch both the original Day The Earth Stood Still and the remake and write a short piece on how modern day culture prevented a straight remake being made.

It's got absolutely nothing to do with that... it's because they hired a shit writer who didn't want to touch the subject of worldwide conflict and thinks that everyone is already in harmony.

And yeah I wholeheartedly recommend anyone watches the original rather than this... some of the special effects are complete shite... but I can understand bad special effects back then (plus it's part of the fun) what I don't understand is absolutely shit scripts today.

[The Mask of Norro]

The film would have been better if it had some fucking resolution. Seriously, it was a decent flick up until the ending, which soured the entire bloody movie and rendered everything that had happened pointless.

Spoiler: Click here to view

Oh, wooo, Klaatu sacrifices himself to save everyone, awesome. Now, with that out of the way... how is humanity supposed to know what the fuck to do now that it's all over? Like... outside of Klaatu's little inner circle of peeps in the movie, who else understands that they have to "change their ways" in order to avoid being fucking destroyed? I mean really.

That, and the entire point of the original, and the commentaries that were made for its time, were completely lost in this one. They claimed to be adapting it for our time, but all they did was adapt it into an okay popcorn flick with a shit ending.

[StevenRichardsRules]

Yeah, I agree with you, Norro. At the end, I basically just threw my arms in the air. I mean, how is Earth supposed to figure out where to go from the end when most people have no idea why the whole thing even happened? At the end, it just felt like someone was grabbing me and screaming in my face "Save the planet! SAVE IT!". Fuck off.

[ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster]

[Clawson]

I didn't really like the original (shoot me, whatever) and I fucking hate Keanu Reeves. So I passed on it when my friends went to see it and they came back saying it was shit.

[ZJ Penn]

Yeah it was bad. The best bit was when they said about the object soon to crash into earth and asked for ideas and this guy straight away says "Can't we divert it with a rocket?".

[K]

original one rules

[apsham]

I just read the differences in this version, and christ... isn't there a law against messing up something THAT bad?

[GhostMachine]

I just read the differences in this version, and christ... isn't there a law against messing up something THAT bad?

No, there isn't. But I think Keanu's punishment for being in this crap should be a choice between either doing Bill and Ted 3 or being in a movie directed by Uwe Boll.

[Hellfire]

I thought that when Keanu sacrificed himself, it caused all the electrical stuff on earth to die and forced people to change their ways anyhow? I haven't seen the original, but I didn't think that this was that bad on its own.

[The Mask of Norro]

I thought that when Keanu sacrificed himself, it caused all the electrical stuff on earth to die and forced people to change their ways anyhow? I haven't seen the original, but I didn't think that this was that bad on its own.

No, no it did not. Because, you see, if it just so happened to cause all the electrical stuff to die, people would know how to rebuild it. Furthermore, if it caused all the electrical stuff to die, and people realized that the aliens were gone, but there was no more electricity, more rioting and looting would break out than in the history of mankind and the whole fucking planet would eat itself into its own end.

How is humanity collectively going to change its ways when the one message they were supposed to gather wasn't even sent out to them in the first place? If losing electricity worldwide is all they get, then the first thought on everyone's minds will either be "Let's fix this" or "Let's take advantage of this", in which there is going to be one obvious answer made by the majority, and mankind winds up worse off then they were before Klaatu came and tried to teach them a lesson.

You don't even have to have seen the original to know how flawed the logic in the ending was, it was shit. The movie, on its own, was not bad, and could have been good if not for the terrible ending.

Between the fact that there was no fucking way that mankind would learn anything because Klaatu never got any kind-of message out to them, and the fact that the lead kid who, bless him, did the best damn job with his role that he possibly could, but would have never been able to deliver that fucking cheesy and painfully corny line that they actually forced him to say at the very end... seriously, the ending just makes the whole damn thing unwatchable for me.

Oh, and for those of you who haven't seen it, I'll put this in spoiler tags, but that stupid line the kid says at the end? Yeah, picture a kid saying this, and prepare to groan from the pain it causes:

Spoiler: Click here to view

*the giant ark-orb begins lifting into the sky*

Woman: They're leaving.

Kid: No... he's leaving.

*kid looks up thoughtfully at woman, as if suddenly the whole fucking world and all its mysteries have been revealed to him, and he's reached some divine sense of enlightenment*

Really. Just... change the ending, and the movie would have been a decent remake. The way they ended it makes the entire movie pointless, and I can say this with 100% certainty that I am right. Do you know how I know I am right? Let me explain:

Klaatu came to the planet to try and reveal to humanity that in order to save themselves, they would have to change their way of life. To do this, he wished to speak to the world leaders, or at least have a medium in which he could communicate with the entire world. He spends most of the first half of the film trying to fucking do this and being unable to.

When he speaks to the professor, he realizes that humanity has the ability to change despite all the terrible things he's seen of them, but he's not quite sure if they can yet. So he continues observing. His time spent with the kid is actually really good character development, and it helps push the fact that Klaatu is getting to see the pain of human existence but how they persevere despite it and try to adapt. To be honest, this was one of the best parts of the film.

Now then, my point: Klaatu, at the very end, chooses to sacrifice his life so that humanity might live to change themselves. Yet Klaatu, having never received the opportunity to directly communicate with mankind as a whole, left no means for mankind to even understand how to change themselves, or what they need to change.

No matter what way you look at it, the fact of the matter is that the ending makes no fucking sense. "Mankind has to change its ways", let's assume this DOES mean the electricity gets shut off. Okay... there goes our power supply, so are we gonna get some help from those aliens that came all the way over to tell us to stop fucking up our planet, using what is probably some advanced non-electric mode of technology, so that we can actually put together an effort to help the planet?

There are so many holes in the ending that it just wrecks the flow of the entire movie, and, as I said, renders the whole thing pointless. They spent nearly two hours trying to cram into our heads that humanity needed to change to save itself, and that Klaatu was trying to show humanity the error of its ways... and then ends with Klaatu dying without ever saying a goddamn thing to anyone but a small group of people, the power is off, and there is probably rioting and looting all over the damn place as a result without any means whatsoever of proper communication between world leaders, law enforcement, military or otherwise to help take control of the situation.

In short, mankind gets fucked over and collectively shits itself while Klaatu dies happily knowing he did something to keep them from being wiped out so that they might change for the better, not ever knowing that his action has caused all of society to eat itself.

[Dingle]

I'm not going to waste tme ranting over it. I like Keanu in a few things, but not this. To make an obvious pun, it felt like time was just stagnant inside watching this film. Proper let down.