Beware, spoilers!
There we have it. Keanu Reeves wearing a suit and beating up “agents” in the rain once more. We also get him naked in a fetal position once more, covered in goo. Where have we seen this before?The original movie, released in 1951, was one of the true landmarks of science-fiction filmography. It was carrying, for its time, a very timely anti-nuclear, anti-war message; all in the middle of popular alien-invasion movies depicting the general feeling of the era about an impending soviet invasion and soviet spies everywhere (general paranoia also plays a great role throughout the movie). The aliens in this movie have the message that if we don’t stop playing around with atomics as weapons when we enter outer space, they will have to destroy us in self-defense. The image of the kind alien was thoroughly new to the cinemas, the plot was nicely and intelligently written and put to screen by the solid directional skills of Robert Wise, focusing on morals and not on wanton destruction. It carried a message not just for its time, but it is relevant even today with the ongoing terrorist craze and paranoia, too.
Klaatu, despite his superior technology appeared to be a compassionate person seeking understanding and common ground. The 2008 Klaatu doesn’t seem to care one bit. What’s the point of Klaatu visiting Earth in this new adaptation anyway? Here, the aliens have already decided to eradicate all human life because we trashed the environment. The 1951 aliens sought not intervention as long as we kept our grudges on our planet, and they sent Klaatu to warn us. In 2008 they act like landlords, suddenly showing up out of the blue: You screwed up the place, so now you get your ass busted royally, mister. No warnings, no second chances. Shoot first, ask questions later. How fitting for our times with Patriot Acts, water-boarding and so forth! Yet, I believe the parallel is accidental, it’s the public mind that changed. Their president must be some sort of cloned Bush, who goes for endangered planets instead of endangered cheap oil. So, in detail about the great plan to save Earth: Have two specimen taken from every species on Earth in big water bubble-spaceships already hidden throughout the planet (I assume that goes for air-breathing species too…), and no, taking a DNA sample like they did with the scientist at the beginning of the movie would be just too easy (also hurray for future inbreeding). These bubbles then just conveniently sit around on the surface of Earth, even the ones that should be sub-water, allowing to be moved around by humans and letting the scientists figure out the fact that humanity is doomed, because they are “Noah’s Arks”. Then an automatically triggered release of a swarm of self-replicating nanobots on Earth which devour *everything* indiscriminately in their path, so what’s left after them is “scorched Earth”. Allow me to deduce:
Killing everything = Saving the planet
The few bits and pieces torn from the original movie and squeezed into the new script hang out horribly; the end of the discussion with the professor about need bringing change was the only minute I enjoyed in the picture, as it showed distinct signs of brain activity from the people responsible for scripting. I could not bring myself to care for any of the characters in the film. All the “big emotions” in the picture are placed awfully and the character reactions themselves are unnatural more often than they are not. I simply failed to care for any of them. Klaatu had no emotions whatsoever. The scientist chick just acted badly in her underwritten part. The kid, played by the privileged son of Will Smith, has achieved a new level of annoyingness in movie history accompanied by sub-par acting, I believe, wanting me to reach into the screen and give him a good, proper smacking. And yet, a horribly acted moaning and spoiled crying at his father’s grave is what changes Klaatu’s mind about saving humanity in roughly ninety seconds. Even then, he is not sure if he can stop the process. Why on Earth (pardon the pun) is he there, then, if I may ask once again?
Does it make any sense?
The effects all look cheap. Particularly the water-spheres look bad and the new Gort, who is very obviously bad CGI, but for some reason he was enlarged to be five stories tall in this film from the original. The designers tried to make him look like the 1951 version, but they also gave him what appears to be “muscles”. The essentially 1950’s design simply look ridiculous compared to the rest of the movie.
Random nitpicking:
-A thoroughly crushed body can be revived with a few grams of alien goo, a fatal shot wound healed with the aforementioned material, yet when the alien’s kidnap Klaatu’s “template” they leave a huge scarred spot on his hand. Even today, extracting a DNA sample can be achieved by scraping under your tongue without even penetrating the skin.
-The nanobots can dissect a truck with a trailer and a huge stadium in seconds, but suddenly they slow down when our heroes try to make their way through roughly 250 billion of them swarming around everywhere, and hide under a bridge which is also spared.
-Destroying Earth to save it, ‘nuff said.
The whole movie script is disjointed, illogical, lacking a proper direction and substance, heartless and an utter atrocity to the 1951 original movie.
Verdict:
2008: 0.5/10
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