This lo-fi remake effectively comments on contemporary anxieties, writes DONALD CLARKE
A GLANCE at the two (as of today) versions of The Day the Earth Stood Still will tell you a great deal about what bothered citizens in 1951 and what concerns them in 2008.
Both films deal with the aftermath of a troubling visitation by an enigmatic humanoid alien named Klaatu. After landing his ship in a prominent area of greenery (President's Park, Washington DC in Robert Wise's original; Central Park in the remake) the mysterious entity saunters out to greet the public, only to be shot by a nervous soldier. While a huge robot stands guard by the vessel, Klaatu is taken to hospital, where it soon becomes apparent that he has travelled to persuade the human race to be a little bit less frightful.
In the early 1950s, as McCarthyism was just getting into swing, the alien, played by the hitherto unthreatening Michael Rennie, was particularly worried about the threat of nuclear obliteration. This time round, the neatly whittled log that goes by the name of Keanu Reeves - Keanu? Klaatu? You can see how the actor came to mind - is more taken up with our accidental campaign of terror against the natural world.
When Klaatu says that he is here because of a danger to the planet, Kathy Bates's Secretary for Defence initially assumes that he means to save humankind. But, in one of the films neater twists, we soon realise that the danger to the planet is humankind. As one character said in another Keanu Reeves movie: "Human beings are a disease . . . and we are the cure."
Well, that does chime very much with current concerns. But theres more. The film appears to have dressed itself in recycled cardboard and driven to work in a Prius to avoid using up too many of the earth's precious resources. The budget was somewhere in the region of $90 million, but the film is much more low-key than the wide posters and loud TV adverts suggest.
Largely shot on soundstages, featuring decidedly unremarkable computer-generated effects, the new version of the story comes across like a goodish episode of The X-Files (and not just because, like that series, it was shot in Vancouver).
That is not necessarily a bad thing. Freed from the need to demolish a mountain range every other minute, Scott Derrickson, director of the so-so The Exorcism of Emily Rose, has space to focus on the personal drama at the story's centre.
Jennifer Connelly, no less icy than usual, plays a widowed astrobiologist (a real thing, according to my associate Dr Wikipedia) who is struggling to make friends with her late husband's traumatised child (Jaden Smith, son of Will). When the spaceship lands, she is spirited away to a research centre and ordered to sedate Klaatu. Being a thoughtful sort, she assists his escape instead.
So, the film ain't great. Reeves may be well cast as a vaguely robotic spaceman, but the lapping waves of his monotonic delivery do tend to make the viewer more than a little dozy. The finale is somewhat perfunctory and the sets are almost defiantly ugly. Still, unlike so many overblown event movies, The Day the Earth Stood Still does have a soul, and it never forgets to tell us a decent story.
What will it tell future historians about 2008? That we had a peculiar passion for self-flagellation? That all smart people in this era - John Cleese's professor here; Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs - listen to Bach's Goldberg Variations? That we got distracted and failed to appreciate that the apocalypse would, after all, still result from a nuclear conflagration?
Madagascar 2 doesn't generate those sorts of questions.
Directed by Scott Derrickson. Starring Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Connelly, Jaden Smith, John Cleese, Jon Hamm, Kathy Bates. 12A cert, gen release, 103 min ***
