The Day The Earth Stood Still

We’ve had ET and we’ve had Close Encounters. Now it’s The Iron Giant and that skinny bloke in the suit from The Matrix. Alien invasion was better in Mars Attacks!, certainly more believable. There are no jokes in The Day The Earth Stood Still and you can’t have Armageddon without a bit of black humour.

Expecting an asteroid to hit Manhattan at five million miles an hour, the US army and selected scientists witness the gentle touchdown of a ginormous Christmas decoration, a perfect sphere, glazed with light. From the dust of the landing emerges a big lizardy thing, with arms and legs, followed by an iron man, the size of 10 tanks on top of each other. Naturally, this being America, the lizardy thing is shot at the moment it is about to meet and greet astro biologist Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly). During surgery to extract the bullets, the doc discovers a naked man-shape, hidden within the soft placenta-like body matter. This is Klaatu (Keanu Reeves) and he/it’s alive.

From this moment the film begins to die, which is a fitting metaphor, because Klaatu's mission is to save Earth by killing every human being on it. Coming from outer space and therefore smarter than Sarah Palin, the aliens have studied man’s addiction to power, self-destruction and reality TV. It is time to cut short the fast-food generation and return Earth to its virgin state.

The plot runs deep beneath the surface of the absurd, weighed down by abject seriousness. Helen contains within her back story, Hollywood’s new essential ingredient, an AK (annoying kid), who is the son of her dead husband and played by Will Smith’s lad, Jaden. He interferes too much, with an aggressive attitude towards awkward strangers - shoot first, think later - influenced by the Bush Administration, no doubt, when, in a film like this, he should have been left with a neighbour and picked up when it’s all over.

Helen, the AK and Klaatu go on the run, while the Secretary of Defence (Kathy Bates) considers the future of mankind and attempts to persuade the (unseen) president that brute force is not the best option against a superior intelligence. Helen, meanwhile, is pleading with Klaatu that man can change – is this a promo for Barack Obama? – and give us one more chance, as plagues of metal-eating insects start devouring entire cities.

It is too easy to make fun of Keanu, the film star, and say that he is typecast here. Deadpan, flat voiced, unemotional, Klaatu requires no acting, only walking, and a few magic tricks to prove he is not of this world. Connelly gives little impression of being a brainy boffinette, perhaps because Helen spends too much of her time telling the AK how much she loves him, because being a step-mom is almost as difficult as saving the planet. Only Bates, in no more than a cameo role, enlivens this corpse of a script (writer’s name withheld to protect the guilty). As an action picture and travesty of a remake, The Day The Earth Stood Still does what it says on the billboard; it stays still. Apart from flashes of CGI activity very little happens.

And – here’s a spoiler – they don’t kiss.