Speaking of which, where is Robert Downey when you need him? He would have made a great Klaatu, injecting the space dude with wit and charm, two things Reeves will never possess.īut then Downey is smart enough to avoid the kind of junk that’s the equivalent of Detroit – big, clunky and in serious need of a bailout. And the set decorations by David Brisban are as rote as they are bland, especially Klaatu’s spaceship and his trusty robot Gort.īoth objects look ridiculous, with the former reimagined as a giant swirling orb that sat itself down in the middle of Central Park (the scene was Washington, D.C., in the original) and the latter resembling Iron Man on steroids. Half the time you can’t see what the heck is going on. He can’t even get the film’s look right, as he and cinematographer David Tattersall bathe a majority of the scenes in a fog thicker than Keanu’s head.
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He fails repeatedly at infusing his movie with any heft or immediacy, resulting in numerous yawns and increasingly heavy eyelids. “Earth’s” most immediate threat, though, is Derrickson.
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And why bother creating roles for TV hunks Jon Hamm (“Mad Men”) and Kyle Chandler (“Friday Night Lights”) when there’s absolutely nothing for them to do? In Scarpa’s rewrite, no one is the least bit redeemable, especially Jaden Smith (the talent-starved son of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett) as Connelly’s rat-fink stepson. That includes the original’s key plot point: Klaatu gradually being won over by the inner goodness of Earthlings. Reeves, who seems to be playing Ted Logan, his character from the “Bill & Ted” films, again delivers one of his patented “whoooah” performances that confuses monotonic mumbles and permanently clueless expressions for acting.īut then even his more esteemed costars, including Oscar-winners Jennifer Connelly as the astrobiologist who comes to Klaatu’s defense and Kathy Bates as the secretary of defense who wants to kill him, are hung out to dry by a barebones script by David Scarpa that removes everything that was insightful and intelligent about the 1951 film penned by Edmund H. It also should have realized that just because Reeves’ acting is often compared with the prime ingredient in fertilizer, nobody wants it sprinkled all over them. If this film really wanted to present a “green” agenda, it should have begun by not wasting the celluloid it’s printed on. Anyone older can expect to pay $10 for the right to sit slack jawed as director Scott “Hack” Derrickson (“The Exorcism of Emily Rose”) fills the screen with idiotic characters, pointless action and muddled themes about preserving the environment. Patriots fans will particularly enjoy what the invaders do to Giants Stadium.Īh, but I digress just like the movie, which has the attention span of a 4-year-old, which is apparently the target audience. Where Robert Wise’s 1951 original served as an enlightening metaphor critical of a festering Cold War mentality threatening Earth’s existence, this remake is content to merely blow things up. I think I honestly would rather have every one of my teeth yanked sans Novocain than sit through a repeat of this discombobulated mish-mash of horrendous acting, cheesy special effects and childlike storytelling. He’s the worst catastrophe in a disaster movie that’s too imbecilic to be taken seriously and much too dull for camp. The role of Klaatu, the deep, brilliant and compassionate visitor from another universe, is about as far outside of Reeves’ wheelhouse as a Joba Chamberlain fastball directed at Kevin Youkilis’ head. Your first clue that this was an incredibly bad idea sits glaringly directly above the title: Keanu Reeves. Nothing represents this incongruity more than “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” the stupefying redo of one of the greatest, most profound alien invasion stories ever set to film. It’s a business of diminishing returns intended simply to gouge a few more dollars out of consumers paying more for less.
Both are indicative of the lazy, no-risk mentality currently threatening U.S. I hate remakes almost as much as I despise sequels.
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