Very late movie review

I think it was sometime in the last 12 months that I bought and re-watched the original The Day The Earth Stood Still.  It was, to be honest, rather slower than I remembered.  Certainly its most spectacularly anachronistic feature says more about us than aliens:  it was the way the widowed Mum immediately trusts a single male stranger who turns up at home to take her son on an outing in the city.   (Today, she would be arrested by social services for the alien failing to have a Blue Card.)    But still, it's a good film and a classic in serious 1950's moralistic science fiction.

Last night I caught up with the 2008 remake with Keanu Reeves.   As I think some reviewers noted at the time, Keanu does "alien" pretty well.   The film looks pretty good for the most part, and the switch to the aliens being concerned about the planet for environmental reasons rather than nuclear war is a good idea conceptually.    But I have 4 problems with it, which I will put in increasing order of severity:

1.  Kathy Bates as Secretary of Defence?   She just wasn't right for the role.  I kept expecting her to take a sledgehammer to Keanu's ankles for the sake of the planet.

2.  The black stepchild who wanted to blow up the aliens instead of befriending them.  This is rather against the tenor of modern children, isn't it, whether or not they have a dead father who in the military?   Besides, he wasn't a very good actor.

3.  Did it make any sense at all at the start that the government pulls a team of experts together to deal with a mystery, potentially destructive, object heading towards New York, only to put them in helicopters hovering above Manhattan while the unknown object hurtled towards Central Park?  That's a rhetorical question:  no, it made no sense at all.

4.  What happened at the end?   How did Keanu stop the nanobots?  Turned out to be pretty easy for him.  What did the alien clean up team think about this?   Was the Earth going to start again?  (Maybe it did - I was getting sleepy towards the end.)  Did the "ark" spheres still take the critters collected off the planet?  Why? 


It was the worst science fiction ending, in terms of ambiguity, I can remember, at least at the moment.  Just terrible.  This was, by far, the biggest downfall of the movie.