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The Day the Earth Stood Still

• Directed by Scott Derrickson
• Written by David Scarpa
• Starring Keanu Reeves and Jennifer Connolly
• Classification: PG
• 

The 1951 movie The Day the Earth Stood Still wasn't one of those sci-fi movies you could laugh at. Strictly a class act, it was conceived of as a message movie to address the fears of the atomic age and Cold War. Directed by Robert Wise, who edited Citizen Kane, with music by Bernard Herrmann, the story was adapted by Edmund North from a 1930s pulp novella into a Christian allegory of an alien who comes to Earth bringing a message of peace to mankind. There were state-of-the-art special effects, including a ray-beam-shooting robot named Gort, but the film is best remembered for its almost documentary simplicity and thoughtful message.

The new movie is by director Scott Derrickson, who has made a couple of horror films, so it seems wise to adjust expectations. Yet for a half-hour or so, The Day the Earth Stood Still looks like an entirely respectable update. After an unnecessary prologue in the 1920s, the movie jumps to its original opening: Scientists around the world are tracking a mysteriously fast object headed toward the American East Coast as the U.S. military prepares for what looks like a catastrophe.

The first few scenes follow the original with a few variations: The landing of a space ship in New York's Central Park (the original was in Washington), in a scene embellished with Close Encounters of the Third Kind religiosity. Out of the spaceship emerges the humanoid Klaatu (Keanu Reeves) and his robot bodyguard Gort, who is reimagined as a black figure about eight metres tall who seems to have done some serious gym time. In contrast, there's the plump and mumsy Kathy Bates, amusingly miscast as a hardball American Secretary of Defence, who takes Klaatu into a military hospital for interrogation.

The new film also introduces Jennifer Connolly as scientist Helen Benson, a specialist in extraterrestrial bacteria and a single stepmother of an obnoxious but cute kid, Jacob ( Pursuit of Happyness's Jaden Smith). On the evening of the crash, a fleet of federal agents takes her to join a scientific team assembled to handle the crisis. Helen is sympathetic to the alien and decides to help him. Soon, Klaatu, Helen and Jacob are on the run from the military through the New Jersey woods, which is where the movie starts to get lost. Is it a sanctimonious message film or an explosion-filled blockbuster?

Klaatu explains to Jennifer that a coalition of Earth-friendly civilizations has decided that the planet needs to be flushed clean of its most destructive species. "We can change," Helen says earnestly. And then she makes the kind of decision that proves she's brilliant. She takes Klaatu to visit John Cleese.

Unfortunately this isn't the real John Cleese, who would inspire any intelligent alien to zip back to his home planet with box sets of Monty Python and Faulty Towers DVDs in the trunk of his spaceship, extolling the genius of our species. This Cleese plays a kindly Nobel Prize-winning professor, a specialist in "biological altruism." He lives in a woodsy house, listening to Bach and demonstrating the lifestyle that civilized humans can enjoy.

The scientist offers a dubious Wile E. Coyote theory of humanity: We're the sort of beings who are best at changing directions only after we realize we've gone too far. Klaatu/Keanu slowly mulls this news, and when he sees how cute little Jacob can be, he mutters to Helen: "I can see there's another side to you."

As the slow but educable alien, Reeves is a ridiculously easy target, but you can't blame his sleepwalker's monotone (he's an alien, after all) for the film's progressive sag. Nor can you fault Connolly for her dour protector role, which would be justified if the movie showed any evidence of caring. From the start, the environmental message is undermined by ubiquitous product placements for everything from Microsoft to McDonald's. And finally, The Day the Earth Stood Still proves less interested in saving the planet than watching it go boom.

Back in Manhattan, the eco-warrior robot Gort (a stand-in for Al Gore?) is kidnapped by a team of scientists who subject it to the kind of indignities that, according to tabloid reports, aliens regularly perform on rural farmers. And then, in the final third, it's as if Roland Emmerich ( Independence Day) were shoved into the director's chair as Gort unleashes computer-generated effects that dissolve trucks, buildings and a sports stadium. The audience members who are expecting an action film will probably say, "About time."

By the time The Day the Earth Stood Still has turned into The Day the Earth Got Loud, it resembles a genetic experiment gone awry. As a message movie, it's preachy without being serious; for an action movie, there's a lot of racket but not much fun.