Klaatu barada nikto

Every so often one feels like an alien. Why is everybody else so wrong all the time? Why do people--humans, that is--insist in driving like total morons? Why do I know what the world's leaders should be doing, but they don't? It makes one feel so hopeless. Then one hears a snatch of Bach. It's transcendently beautiful. One realizes Bach too, technically anyway, was a human. And so the race must be saved. We can't throw out the Bach with the bath, can we?

That's what this movie's about, more or less. It's based on the 1951 Robert Wise sci-fi classic. In the original, followed here in many outward respects, a superior being who's assumed human form came to earth with a giant robot called Gort. They represented an intergalactic organization of peaceable cultures who wanted to save us from nuclear destruction.

Nowadays the planet is more infested with nuclear bombs and bomb-makers than ever, but fashions in paranoia having changed, in 2008 the alien arrives with an inconvenient truth. Our habits are destroying the earth, and since only a few planets can sustain life, this matters. We don't turn out to be too amenable to discussion, or even friendly, toward this visitor. It might have helped if he'd said he was coming. Everybody thought his space ship was a meteor that was going to destroy Manhattan. Anyway, almost the minute he walks out the door into Central Park he's met with a barrage of heavy weaponry and sustains a serious bullet wound. It just gets worse from there, and the more he sees of us, the more he's convinced that we're just a heedless, headstrong species. To save the planet he therefore decides that we, and all our stuff, have simply got to go.

Precisely because Fifties sci-fi was crude technically, it worked better as fable. As the effects have grown, they've taken up the space for ideas and the time for people to talk. This new Day hasn't changed the traditional sci-fi trappings: hysterical mobs, clumps of concerned citizens, experts, and leaders. Weaponry, men in uniform, commanders barking useless orders, shimmering spaceships, stalking monsters. Screens flashing technical information. A blackboard covered with mysterious equations only the smartest guys understand. This time invading critters have been added, and CGI, if not of the finest quality. All of which may delight an eight-year-old boy, but doesn't add up to much because this isn't a very good movie. It's not a terrible one either, and it does give one that am-I-an-alien? feeling. But it is probably less thought-provoking than the original, partly because of the emphasis on the effects, and partly because the writing and direction are not top-drawer.

The President has fled to an undisclosed location, like Dick Cheney, and the main authority figure is, presciently for our time, a female Secretary of Defense--Kathy Bates, in a lame, back-and-forth role.

There's a smart, plucky woman astrobiologist, and Jennifer Connelly is good at that. There's a cute, uncooperative kid, her foster son, and Jaden Smith (son of Will) is good at that. And Keanu Reeves, as Klaatu, makes a super alien. But his dialogue is limp and preachy and after a while it goes stale. He never gets to deliver the most famous robot-language line in the literature, "Klaatu barada nikto," which was a "safe-word" phrase designed to be used in an emergency, if necessary, to save Klaatu and stop Gort from destroying the earth. Neither does the "earth stand still" to demonstrate Klaatu's power to earthlings and convince them they must change, as in the original movie.

On the run with Helen (Connolly) and Jacob (Smith) after being confined and interrogated, Klaatu meets a Chinese alien in a Macdonald's who's lived on earth seventy years and come to like humans. (Doubtless he's been here too long and should have been reassigned.) Klaatu also encounters a a Nobel scientist (John Cleese), with the blackboard full of equations and a nice rug. This is where Klaatu hears the snatch of Bach and realizes humans can make beautiful things.

The best thing about aliens is that they have a human side. Klaatu is nice enough to reconsider wiping out the human species, even after he's unleashed a plague upon us. Can he even stop it? The ending is muffled and anticlimactic. Kids, or the kid in you, will like the CGI swarms of viruses that invade everything and fly around in the form of metallic locusts. They gobble a freeway sign in nanoseconds and a whole giant truck speeding down the highway in not much longer. But in doing this, they also gobble up time the movie might have had to mean something more. And due to the writing, Keanu/Klaatu, though in his conception and how he's introduced he's more convincingly alien than Robert Wise's, comes to seem a Johnny One Note, which nothing to offer us but his pathetic lack of affect and his tiny, half-convincing movement toward pity. One remembers, and misses, the delight of Jeff Bridges' alien in John Carpenter's Starman, a film full of inventive writing such as this lacks.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.