The Day the Earth Stood Still (Remake)
Starring: Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Connelly, Kathy Bates, Jon Hamm, Jaden SmithDirector: Scott Derrickson
Year of Release: 2008
I felt like my life stood still while watching this movie. As far as disaster movies go, this one just dragged on with very little momentum or excitement. All the cool visuals were mostly already out there in the trailers leaving us with just a very emotionless Keanu Reeves, witless Jennifer Connelly, and an annoying kid played by Jaden Smith (Will and Jada’s kid) already showing signs of monster ego.
Keanu Reeves has made a career out of emotionless, dispassionate characters. You could totally see his character in this film turn around and say “We have to go. Morpheus is waiting.” He has the charisma of a can of paint. And Jennifer Connelly is a competent enough actress, but why she is there, why she believes this alien, and pretty much why she does anything are all a mystery to the audience. Who knows why anyone is doing anything.
The plot is basically humans are jacking up the planet and the aliens want to stop them from doing that by getting rid of the humans. Supposedly they have good reasons to believe that humans are hopeless and doomed. Yet the alien somehow has his mind changed in less than a day. Huh!? And honestly, humans ARE jacking up the planet so even I don’t believe Jennifer Connelly’s heartfelt pleading that “we can change!”. I don’t believe her and I don’t get why Keanu would either. Let the big bad alien wipe them out, humans probably deserve it.
And speaking of the big bad alien, the “enforcer” alien – GORT – was pretty bad ass. I really wanted to him just start going nuts on those soldiers. To be fair, GORT was only playing defense. They screwed with him first every tiime.
Overall this movie was a big snoozefest that did not deliver on the hype. Rent it on DVD, you are not missing anything in the theaters.
