The Day The Earth Stood Still
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Thursday, 18 December 2008
I’m the worst person to go to a film with, because I actually laugh (as in, out loud) at the Orange ads that go out just before the film starts. I think they’re brilliant. (US readers and anyone else who doesn’t know what an Orange ad is: Orange is a mobile [cell] phone network and their cinema advertisements ads always feature the same five actors, headed by Brennan Brown, who play Hollywood producers who receive a pitch from a real celebrity actor whom they then humiliate by rewriting it so that it’s about mobile phones. The Rob Lowe one is on YouTube as is the late Roy Scheider one.) The producers believe a) every film should feature product-placement so it must be b) set in the present and c) should capitalise on their stars’ fame, effectively type-casting (mostly) serious actors. The great irony of this is that these are so close to the truth that they’re practically documentary rather than satire or send-up.
Consider The Day The Earth Stood Still. Gary Farber was awestruck by the ’breadth and depth of the trashing reviews.’ Those reviews are pretty much wrong. Apart from where they’re right. I mean, it’s not as bad as they make it seem, nor quite as stupid. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Keanu Reeves’ Klaatu’s body is supposed to be human (what part of him is not his body?) but he seems to have powers humans don’t have. He’s pretty much magical: he can make a car roll into a policeman just by placing his hands on it (wasn’t the handbrake on? but that’s the least of the obvious problems); he can make unconnected phones connect by fiddling with a lead; he can stood down helicopters (or just interfere with their electrics or something) at a distance, but only when they can see him. You do think the moments of peril could have been escaped less magically by better screenwriting. Well, I did think that. I don’t know about you.
Back to those Orange ads. The Keanu Reeves here is definitely a bit Neo from the Matrix. The product placement is not subtle. It feels gratuitous, almost as if it was shot separately after the slots had been sold to the highest bidder. And there’s a kid, Jaden Smith whose obvious, unoverlookable non-relatedness to Jennifer Connelly requires an awful lot of the little dialogue left after "what the hell is happening now?" and "listen Earthlings, because I am going to moralise rather a lot." There was a programme on Radio 2 last week about CDs versus vinyl (I only caught a clip on Radio 4’s "Pick of the Week") which reminded me that it used to be claimed that CDs could be smeared with honey and still play. This seemed to be the thinking behind Master Smith’s role in the film. Someone thinks the film needs a kid (why? really, why?) and someone else thinks, hell it’ll pull in the ankle-biters and won’t do any harm. I think the kid is the biggest mistake. The classification for ’TDTESS’ in the UK is 12A (which means under 12s can see it with an adult). I don’t think under 12s much want to see a 10 year old orphan who misses his dead dad and is generally goopy. If you’re going to have kids in a kids’ movie (which ’TDTESS’ is), buck them up a bit. Show some vim. So anyway, you put honey on a CD, wash it off, and stick the CD in the player and it goes "TD!-td-td-td-td-td" or something. Well it did when Annie Nightingale played ’Thriller’ by Michael Jackson. All the kid scenes were like that.
This is not art.
Everyone says how great the original movie was. Bits of it are on YouTube. Some of the beginning here and Klaatu’s Final Speech. I’m pretty sure that the original film (1951) was the source of the 1950s flying saucer cults though Wikipedia annoying refuses to confirm this. The original shows its age, not just with the ship. The ship then had travelled "outside the Earth’s atmosphere". Pre-Sputnik, that was outrageous. Klaatu’s Speech wouldn’t wash now, and I doubt it could have been delivered above the catcalls in Shakespeare’s Globe. It’s dull. And it’s bossy. And it doesn’t make much sense. Moral: hand over peacekeeping to robots, robots who seem very deferential and not particularly intelligent. What would happen to the galactic civilisation if a cat-robot alliance formed? Those aliens would regret making the robots all-powerful very quickly, I can tell you.
When the 1951 Klaatu was shot, he was pulling a device from his one-piece silver suit (standard issue five years from now). He speaks perfect English, but he doesn’t realise that a gun-drawing gesture is provocative in the US. That is crazy. And the device was a clever-gimmicky-thing which I’ve forgotten already and gift for ’your’ President. Of the US, of course. The remake is so much better. Keanu-Klaatu doesn’t recognise the US’s authority, only all of humanity. And he’s not about to bring gifts to any leaders. He’s not a suck-up, he’s a badass. A terminally confused and sloppy badass, perhaps, but a hard-core, old-school badass of badassery if he needs to be. It’s not just that I agree with the politics, I love the Iraq etc references. The UN, not the US. (Go, Keanu-Klaatu!) Kathy Bates acting as a proxy for the President and Vice-President because both are hiding in undisclosed locations. 9/11 and Dick Cheney’s career (metaphorically). This is good knockabout stuff. The President makes one decision (other than trying to save his own ass) in the film: it’s to override Kathy Bates’ late conversion to negotiation and order the termination of Keanu-Klaatu. Carried out by the post-Iraq military, of course, this doesn’t work, but is, in character, just about the worst response. Actually, under Bush would the FBI and the National Guard be able to round up top scientists? Or would they just pull in evangelists, talk show hosts, Paris Hilton, Sean Hannity, Mitt Romney, Alan Keyes, Jon Voight, all that crew? Can the military really organise anything? Would they torture anyone non-white?
I wasn’t terribly happy with the eco-friendly stuff. Animals get saved but not plants; I think there are going to be problems in the food-chain, oh, about now. The little backgrounder at the start on Jennifer Connelly’s science smarts was not bad actually. Extremophiles, Callisto, that was plausible. But along comes Keanu-Klaatu and declares life very rare in the universe (which by the way "wastes nothing"). And John Cleese with a Nobel in "biological altruism". Let’s be generous and assume the Nobel was in Economics because everyone knows there isn’t a biology one. So Cleese is a sort of US based analogue of John Maynard Smith (at least, I equate game theory and altruism) as well as an all-purpose genius because Keanu-Klaatu revises some quantum mechanical equations (K-K is fluent in all mathematical notations; it’s just lucky that Cleese isn’t one of those boffins who uses a semi-private algebra of his own devising like, well, all of them, because if you can hack with extant maths you’re not cutting any edges). Every Nobel winner keeps his mind fresh by revising the Standard Model doesn’t he?
So far, so poor. And I don’t even want to mention Gort. The humanoid robot with lethal eye-beames really doesn’t transfer to the 21st century. But it’s all kind of fun and Reeves and Connelly are pleasant to look at. There’s a certain energy to it all and everyone is very game. I didn’t feel that an hour-and-a-half of my life was gone forever and someone should pay. It should have been better: less silly action, more jokes. (Was I the only person who was reminded of Ford Prefect by the other alien operative whose report seemed to condense as ’Mostly harmless [but they won’t change]’?) Maybe it should have been directed by someone else. Bad scenes at the end stick out. K-K and Connelly can’t run to the sphere-spaceship - so they run in front of it. London is returned to the 1950s and Parliament Square is radically redesigned meanwhile in Sydney (also in daytime)... Did Keanu-Klaatu die? This is the question which will bother university debating societies around 2016. Why didn’t K-K take back the universal air-guitar gesture as Earth’s contribution to peace and understanding?
The critical drubbing, however, was unfair. Especially from Roger ’Am I supposed to watch the whole movie?’ Ebert. Some films, perhaps really all of them, aren’t worth thinking about; they’re just harmless fun. Just like film critics: who don’t have an impressive hit-rate of picking classics at release.
And I only saw the film because I was quite tickled by the stunt which annoyed Paul Glister. A really, really silly and phoney stunt from any angle other than publicity grubbing. (NB I am a mug.)
The great 1950s sci-fi film was not ’TSTESS’ but Forbidden Planet. I’ve heard there have been attempts to stage it on an island with a magician and sailors and stuff, but this is sacrilege. Everyone knows (see all the critics on the Gary Farber link), that you can’t fiddle with a classic script.
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