Die, another Day

A famous American once said there’s nothing to fear but fear itself, but fear itself can be pretty goddamned scary. Apparently when Americans feels fear they instinctively resort to blowing shit up, no matter how unbelievably stupid such actions may be. In the new, longer, dumber and duller version of The Day the Earth Stood Still poor old Klaatu the alien gets pumped with lead before he can even get a word out. His people have studied long to understand our earthly ways, but I guess no one ever told them it was dangerous to be in Central Park at night.

Klaatu arrives in a big misty sphere to serve mankind its eviction notice. We’ve abused this planet long enough it seems, and interplanetary real estate’s at a premium, so out we go in a plague of metallic locusts that can chomp through baseball stadiums without stopping for a breather. Unless of course, like Ebenezer Scrooge, we can convince our executioner of our capacity for change.

After Klaatu busts out of his placenta suit and absconds, rather implausibly, from the military facility where he’s being prodded, he spends a little time on our company. Disguised as Keanu Reeves in a suit—is this really the most inconspicuous shape he could think to assume?—he liaisons with astrophysicist Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly). She gives him a lift to some state park where more alien spheres lay waiting to get their Armageddon on. From there it’s off to the home of a Nobel-prize winning biologist (John Cleese) where Klaatu hears Bach. It’s beautiful, he says with genuine awe. Somebody take this guy to a record store! We could speed things along with some Procol Harum.

If the aliens really do come and threaten to kill us all it would certainly not be advisable to show them this movie. Klaatu can resuscitate the dead, make helicopters smash into each other, create ear-piercing noises and get tuna sandwiches out of the vending machines for free—he’s not going to be impressed by these lame special effects, the pointless artificial camera swoops around cars and poorly matched green-screening. He might have a soft spot for kids, granted, but Helen’s stepson is so relentlessly annoying that such a gambit seems doomed to backfire. Helen herself is a total fox, but Klaatu’s libido has apparently been Zenned into submission. So yeah, it’s pretty much hopeless.

The new Day is just as didactic as the old one while lacking all of its fun. Yet director Scott Derrickson seems uninterested in fun anyway. His apocalypse is boring, the overwhelming loss flatly abstract, the menace bland, the story needlessly padded. The original film’s spectral spookiness has been traded in for murky imagery and boilerplate design. Reeves doesn’t help much either. The single thing he needs to do here is change his mind, yet he can’t quite manage it. If they needed a supernaturally handsome, seemingly enlightened but nonetheless otherly-looking famous person to play Klaatu couldn’t they have got Richard Gere? How about David Byrne? Better yet, why not Al Gore? Give him a little software, set him up in Times Square and Bob’s your uncle.

Killer pacifism: The Day the Earth Stood Still lands again on DVD

The premise, however mimicked over the years, still intrigues. The spacecraft descends upon Washington DC, the stoic alien emerges from within, the gasping crowds look on, the rifles, canons and tanks are at the ready. Before he can get a word out, before he can offer his enigmatic little metallic flower/toilet cleaner thingee, the alien’s preemptively shot in the chest by jittery US military. He’s taken to hospital, is examined, and recovers completely. In appearance and mode of expression he seems one of us, more or less—he’s played by English actor Michael Rennie—but is very emphatically an Other. He speaks of “your months,” “your miles” and “your Walter Reade Hospital.” He speaks to his robot in a language that sounds like Japanese. He’s a chameleon. His name is Klaatu. He’s come a long way to give us some sobering advice. He seems unshakably civil, but if his words aren’t heeded, he promises to exact an apocalyptic wrath beyond comprehension.

Though made during those first tender years of the Cold War and wielding an overt message in response to the proliferation of nuclear arms, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) pulsates with age-old anxieties. 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. We are rendered small by it. But the eagerness to repent and defer to a higher authority deserves some serious consideration.

Directed by Robert Wise, written by Edmund North, beautifully photographed by Leo Tover, mesmerizingly scored with double Theremin in the mix by Bernard Herrmann, the film is far too superbly crafted to be dismissed as period kitsch, even if he appearance of Gort, Klaatu’s mostly immobile giant robot, its featureless visage the subject of many creepily inert close-ups, locates it firmly within the imaginative limits of contemporaneous science fiction. Following Klaatu’s unmet demands to confer with ambassadors from every country in the world, the story slides from the grandiose to the intimate and back again, with some of the most memorable scenes occurring during Klaatu’s escape from captivity and quiet immersion in everyday American life, his spooky arrival at the rooming house bathed in shadow, or his final taxi ride with Helen (Patricia Neal), a single mom who along with her happy little boy represents our best hopes for betterment. The fact that Klaatu mixes in so easily is of course the point—the Other we fear so is really not so Otherly after all. It’s a fable in service of tolerance and multiculturalism.

Yet if we allow ourselves to play devil’s advocate, to set to one side the supposed moral clarity of Klaatu’s call for the cessation of violence, if we look carefully at this offer we can’t refuse, there’s a most contradictory nature to it that feels ironically akin to recent US foreign policy and the clash of civilizations. I come from a distant place where we know better, Klaatu declares, and your earthly ways don’t jive with ours. Frankly, we can’t tolerate it anymore. Change, Klaatu instructs. Be like we are, and make peace. Or we’ll kill you all. Hegemony rules, and whether international or interplanetary, whether the subjects of the new empire are in the Middle East or the Midwest, the ostensible simplicity and benevolence of this proposal is compromised by the condescension and threat behind it.

So Klaatu is the enlightened alien Other, yet is also quintessentially American, or, if you prefer, human, doing what humans are wont to do when granted immense power. While this reading may very well counter the intentions of Wise, North, et al, addressing this aspect of The Day the Earth Stood Still isn’t meant to belittle it but rather reveal just how complex and durable its proven to be. It’s a virtue of the best science fiction that its value to audiences will shift with time and revelation.

Fox’s new two-disc special edition of The Day the Earth Stood Still, presumably prompted by the theatrical release of the remake, may not offer alternative readings, but it is loaded with supplements to help appreciate the film’s gestation and legacy. A making-of featurette has amusing testimony from Neal—who apparently couldn’t stop laughing during the filming—insights into the film’s technical innovations, and some terrific weird facts, such as Gort’s later life as a performance accessory for Bozo the Clown. There’s also a fun little doc on flying saucers that covers the basic territory—Kenneth Arnold, Betty and Barney Hill, Roswell, et cetera—and equally welcome profiles of North and of Harry Bates, the forgotten magazine editor and author of the course material. These docs are annoyingly cutty, with too many commentators and not enough content from each of them to justify their appearances, but they still give you a flavour of the conditions of the film’s development. There’s also a new audio commentary from Nick Redman, John Morgan, Steven Smith and William Stromberg that, like their commentary for Fox’s recent release of Garden of Evil, focuses exclusively on Herrmann’s music.