seriousfic

They've already changed the message from "stop waging wars and killing each other" to "don't cut down trees." But I suppose it fits that Hollywood has turned a soft-spoken, intellectual film about a soft-spoken, intellectual alien into a shrill, unlikeable film about a shrill, unlikeable alien.

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No, no, Klaatu's still the good guy, apparently. The message seems to be that humans are so evil and corrupt and polluting that a bunch of aliens who don't live here are perfectly justified in coming and slaughtering us all so that we stop drilling for oil or whatever. Clearly the only justified thing in such a situation would be for us all to bow to their superior alien knowledge and assist any nearby children in slitting their throats before slitting our own.

The part where it breaks down is, why do the aliens give a fuck? If we're going to pollute ourselves to death or whatever and take the planet with us, what business is it of theirs? They don't live here, the planet doesn't belong to them.

Really the only way it makes sense is that the aliens regularly stargaze towards Earth, and we're fucking up the view from various high-cost alien penthouses. I'm pretty sure they're actually killing us to preserve their rent prices for their apartments.

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The part where it breaks down is, why do the aliens give a fuck?

To be fair, that was a problem with the original movie as well. I mean, we hadn't even managed to land on the moon yet, so if we wiped each other out with nukes, why should they give a shit?

Which, again, goes to my biggest problem, with both the remake and the original - liberal political agendas and authoritarian methods of enforcement can no longer be reconciled, at least not without a huge helping of hypocrisy, since as

seriousfic pointed out in an earlier post, BOTH versions of Klaatu are basically playing George W. Bush in Iraq, telling a lesser nation how to fucking behave, and that's bullshit.

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That would be a far analog if, say, George W. Bush saw the genocide in Darfur and decided to help out by... nuking Darfur.

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Genocide aside (which is a good point), the fact remains that, with both Klaatu and Bush, you have greater powers fucking around in the affairs of lesser but still sovereign powers "with the best of intentions," and regardless of whether it works out well or not (although it usually doesn't - see also: Vietnam), there's an excellent argument to be made that the greater powers shouldn't be getting involved in the first place. This is the 21st century, and whether you're supposedly defending human rights, free market capitalism or the environment, asserting your right to overthrow another nation's self-determination smacks of White Man's Burden.

Why the fuck should we have to play GloboCop in Bosnia and Israel and everywhere else anyway? With all our best intentions, we haven't accomplished shit, except making all sides involved mad at us, too, so fuck 'em - let 'em sort their shit out for themselves, so that they can't blame us when they fuck themselves over (which they will ALWAYS do).

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let 'em sort their shit out for themselves, so that they can't blame us when they fuck themselves over (which they will ALWAYS do).

See, originally I thought the last bit in parentheses was correctly pointing out that they'll always blame us.

I mean, that's exactly what happens. We go in and try to change things, we're condemned for meddling. We just try to give some aid and help, we're condemned for not doing enough. We do nothing, we're condemned for not giving a shit. I mean, come on, you can see a condemnation of the Iraq war on one channel, and then five minutes later see a commercial demanding that you send money to a country "You don't care about and try not to remember exists."

But that's the root cause of it, I guess. The money. The world is perfectly happy to show up at allowance time, but ask a question about who one of the countries is dating and suddenly it's "GOD I HATE YOU STOP TRYING TO RUN MY LIFE JUST LEAVE ME ALOOOONE!" The world's an angsty, bitchy teenager and America is the parent, caught in a remarkably similar no-win scenario.

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They'll still try to blame us, but as it stands now, 90 percent of the blame we get, as a country, is for being TOO involved. If we have NO involvement, with ANYONE, it's that much harder for them to blame us, especially on the front of supposedly "playing favorites." And while I personally might think that it's more morally right to go into Bosnia than into Iraq, the fact of the matter remains that, as a government, we probably shouldn't be going into either one. Because I'll bet you that, if we really did keep our nose out of EVERYONE else's business for long enough, they'd suddenly become a LOT more welcoming of our intervention.

This is not meant to say that other countries are parasites, and our country is A-Number-One. Rather, it's meant to say that most people in any country, including our own, are assholes who will try to ruin their own lives and everyone else's, so the sooner we disassociate from them as much as we can, the better.

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Yeah, but all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. Also, a stitch in time saves nine.

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Yes, but in the original movie, the aliens are still seeking to save sentient creatures. They've got a goal that's understandable there. The difference is, the original is George W. Bush in reality, saying "Stop fucking slaughtering each other, and if we have to kill some of you to make you do it then that's what we've got to do." The other is the liberal boogieman version of George W. Bush, nuking the entire fucking Middle East into a glass parking lot because he decided it was the most moral thing to do.

The aliens in the original may be meddling assholes, but they're meddling assholes trying to save the lives of sentient beings. They're using extremist methods and they're dickheads about it, but who the hell hasn't wanted to go on a killing spree of Klan members or Neo-Nazis or something?

The aliens in THIS one simply, plainly are going to kill billions of sentient beings to save some fucking trees. (And the really scary thing about it is, I've actually seen people advocate this shit. "Well humans have the whole rest of the planet but elephants only have that one part of it, so yeah if you look at it objectively, the elephants are more important than the humans." Jesus H. Christ that kind of thinking is scary.) SANE people do not say "Billions of human lives versus bugs and animals and plants... well clearly the humans gotta go."

I mean, there's kind of a big difference between some extremism that's arguably bullshit but you can see the point of it, and some extremism that you would have to be a complete and utter psychotic to get behind. The aliens in the original were kinda dicks, the aliens in this one are fucking SOCIOPATHS. The original aliens are dicks, but they're sane dicks. The new aliens are an entire race that need to be put in straitjackets and the little leather-and-metal masks Hannibal Lecter wore because they're slaughter-happy psychos.

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The problem being, the original aliens weren't just dicks, they were also retards, because as human history has proven, any time any third party tries to force two other parties to get along, against their will, the two other parties will team up, but only in an effort to destroy the third party, after which they'll go right back to trying to trying to destroy each other.

If they really wanted to do a relevant remake of the original movie, they should have kept Klaatu's goal the same - ie. to stop war between people - but they should made him out to be the BAD guy for wanting to stop human war, because if you look at the original Klaatu's solution to war - ie. "all of the alien races in our star-spanning federation just hand all of our own power and rights and freedoms over to the custody of these faceless killing machine robots who keep us in line, like cattle" - that's one seriously fucked-up solution.

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Grudge match of the century: Kirk vs. Klaatu. Because if there's one guy who won't tolerate people not holding up their shit and instead delegating to a sinister computer, it's Kirk.

"Gort... what IS love if not... two people... of their OWN free will... CHOOSING..."

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What's funny is, for all his pretense of respecting the rights of sovereign societies, Kirk was as much a meddler as anyone. I mean, how many times did he break the Prime Directive? Of course, as TNG showed, if you actually follow the Prime Directive, you're pretty much screwed, too. I remember a MAD magazine parody in which the characters said, "Capt. Picard, that alien is raping Counselor Troi! What can we do?" "Nothing! The Prime Directive prohibits us from interfering in native mating rituals!"

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That's because idiot TV writers amped the Prime Directive up from a reasonable "careful where you tread" precaution to a dogma that would have the Enterprise not stop a world-ending meteor (because world-ending meteors are important to a civilization's cultural integrity), reaching its nadir in Enterprise where Phlox would rather commit genocide than break ~~Ape Law~~ the proto-Prime Directive.

Hopefully, J.J. Abrams will rein it in to an actual directive rather than a cheap font of DRAMA!

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Dude ... you're trusting J.J. Abrams to save the franchise?

That's like hoping that Joel Schumacher would "rescue" the Batman films after Batman Returns.

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I know, I know...

But I liked Mission: Impossible 3!

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And besides, who knows better, Captain Kirk or a couple billion stinking aliens? Captain Kirk. Every time.

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Kind of proving my point about White Man's Burden, there.

At least Doctor Who is internally consistent about it, because the Doctor doesn't pretend to follow any Prime Directive at all. He's just a total anarchist.

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Except for that time he got all snooty about humans figuring out a way to extend their lifespans. And defending themselves from treacherous aliens. And creating cars that don't pollute the environment...

Oh, RTD, no!

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The "extending lifespans" thing has a lot to do with the Doctor knowing, from direct personal experience, exactly how corrupt a society becomes when its most powerful members are virtually immortal. What gets handwaved a lot in the NuWho era is that, for as much as the Doctor proclaims himself Last of the Time Lords, he really did despise the utter living shit out of 99 percent of his fellow Time Lords, and over the course of the original series, his seething hatred and total contempt for them was pretty much proven 100-percent correct (see also: "Trial of a Time Lord").

The "defending them from other aliens" thing is indeed a bit condescending (which, to be fair to RTD, was actually brought up in "The Stolen Earth," when Harriet Jones points out that she was right to destroy the Sycorax, because the Doctor wouldn't always be there to save Earth).

And the "creating non-polluting cars" thing was actually something that UNIT asked the Doctor to investigate, rather than him proactively going after Luke Rattigan on his own, and even when the Doctor and Rattigan faced off, it was less about OMG U HUMANS CANNOT HAS ADVANCED TECH and more about O HAI SMARTASS SUPERGENIUS KID WITH NO EXTERNAL REGULATING MECHANISM, I RECOGNIZE ~~MYSELF~~ TEH MASTER IN U.

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jlbarnett.livejournal.com

considering the fact he says it's not out planet I'm thinking they aren't aliens originally. They're like Earth's original inhabiatnats or something.

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Yeah, well, you don't abandon a house, come back when other people are living in it, and set fire to the place because you hate the way they've decorated.

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You do if they've set up a rave party in your living room.

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I think he meant that in the "I speak for the trees" sense. You know, like, owls, and, like, snails, and, like, the planet belongs to them to, you know, man!

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Actually, I think you're kind of missing the point (with The Abyss, at least - dunno about The Day The Earth Stood Still remake yet, obviously), which is that, once Ed Harris gets down to see the aliens, they show him their perspective on the human race, and if you take it from their point of view, they're kind of right to kill us off. Now, I have no great confidence in any attempt to recast Keanu in a sci-fi classic, but especially considering that the message of the original was, "Don't fuck up, or we'll destroy you," changing that to "You've already fucked up, and that's why we're going to destroy you" isn't that much of a stretch, because in both cases, the larger message is that our destruction would be our own damn fault.

Personally, I think you're missing the bigger reason to be offended by this film, which is that it's arguing that Authoritarianism Is Right from a liberal perspective. Yes, sci-fi has a long and proud history of arguing this, from H.G. Wells through the original Star Trek series, but I can't think of anyone after Gene Roddenberry who has a brain who thinks it's a good idea anymore.

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I kinda don't get the perspective of "It's wrong that you're killing each other with nuclear weapons, so we're going to kill you all with a giant tidal wave."

It's a little like the "why do we murder murderers to show that murder is wrong?", only now it's "why do we murder murderers and 6.5 billion people who were standing next to him to show that murder is wrong?"

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I kinda don't get the perspective of "It's wrong that you're killing each other with nuclear weapons, so we're going to kill you all with a giant tidal wave."

Some lifeforms would survive a Waterworld. NO lifeforms (except for cockroaches) would survive a Nuclear Holocaust.

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So dolphins get to live over cows and puppies (assuming humans don't count)? Not very environmentalist of those aliens.

And of course, I find it hard to believe that flooding the entire globe wouldn't fuck up the aquatic ecosystem. Just for instance, say a lead factory or nuclear reactor goes underwater...

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Yeah, it's an extremist solution by any stretch, but again, if it's a choice between SOME life and NO life?

At least the Abyss aliens have an excuse, unlike Klaatu, since it's their planet too.

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