Klaatu, barada, go fuck yourself!
Dec. 13th, 2008 02:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficYes, I went to see The Day The Earth Stood Still and yes, it is as horrible as I predicted. In fact, it's a bit worse, since I gave them a little credit for maybe being a little self-aware and satirizing their own premise a little. I mean, the movie's about a fucking environmentalist who would rather save dolphins and trees and widdle bunny rabbits than people. You'd think at one point someone would question his priorities, but no. Not, really. You’d even think there’d be some slight comparison between what we’re doing in Iraq and what Klaatu is doing to Earth, but no, their anti-Bush invective is limited to the President being this trigger-happy moron who orders a strike on Klaatu’s ship… AFTER Klaatu starts blowing up the planet. You know, when any sane person would say "We need to fight back against these people who are right now in the process of killing us!" The movie can’t even criticize Bush right. I mean, GOD DAMN!
So why'd I go see it? Well, first off, I work at a theater, so free tickets. And second, the trailer for Wolverine was in front of it*. Why did I know the trailer for Wolverine** was in front of it? Because they advertised the trailer in the trailer for TDTESS. That's how you know it's quality. "We made this movie full of good actors, Keanu Reeves, top-notch special effects, and writing, so come see it!... for a glimpse at another movie made by an entirely different group of people." That's fucking confidence in your product right there!
You know who I feel sorry for? The ILM guys. You know they're geeks, probably got Gort action figures in their cubicles, and then they have to do the CGI for Gort slaughtering people and Keanu Reeves raking up a body count.
That's right, Klaatu has a body count. He talks with James Hong, who is this other deep-cover alien who has been living among us and actually started a family, but then he says "Kill 'em all... except I'll stay here and die too, with my family, who I love despite my genocidal hatred of the human race." Even James Hong can't make that shit work. How can anyone watch that scene and not think "man, these aliens are douches"? Did they screen this for anyone?
So Klaatu decides "time to kill all humans!" and he starts up Gort, which turns into this gray goo swarm which starts killing everyone. But it's okay, because it's only mean soldiers with Southern accents. Oh, and a trucker. But they probably had a big carbon footprint, so they had it coming.
I need a beer. God, if we keep showing movies like this, I'm gonna have to find a way for my theater to start serving alcohol. Hell, maybe we could make some hash brownies, get a Danish coffeehouse going. I didn’t need it to sit through The Punisher: War Zone, but this shit needs some serious medication to get through.
Like, who wrote this? Humans? Because you’d think they’d have some awareness of human nature, if they were humans. I think I could make a strong case for the Script-o-matic 5000 turning this out during some Brazil type malfunction. The female lead, Helen, is a single mother (of course. And I know, that was all in the original movie, but they take all the sensitivity of that subplot and they replace it with this cliched, saccharine garbage about a bratty kid reconciling with his harried adult) and her little kid has this “you’re not my real mommy!” complex going because his father died in Iraq and she’s just his stepmom. As you will. So you might think this kid would be a little sensitive to the deaths of US servicemen. I mean, being human and all.
So he watches while Klaatu blows away two Army helicopters (he’s supposed to be defending himself, but throughout the film he has more superpowers than pre-Crisis Superman, so I can’t see why he can’t nonlethally dispatch the mean nasty soldiers… oh, wait, I forgot, PRETTY ‘SPLOSIONS!) and then they start to bond! He’s all “I’m lost, can you take me home?” The guy just killed some of your dad’s classmates! Kick him in the shin or something! Go for the balls!
Okay, so the world is ending and all the cities have been conveniently evacuated so we can get some “crowd-pleasing” destruction while we wait for Will Smith to punch out this clearly psychopathic supervillain. But instead, Klaatu sees Helen and her kid have a touching reconciliation and sees the beauty of humanity and you just know Keanu Reeves acts the hell out of that. So he wanders into the Gort swarm, which has previously gobbled up 18-wheelers in three seconds, yet here it barely ruffles his suit, and he heroically sacrifices himself to save the world. From the destruction he directly and intentionally caused.
It’s kinda like Hitler heroically throwing himself into an Auschwitz gas chamber to save the Jews. Yeah, nice timing, Adolf.
And somehow, his anti-heroic sacrifice turns off all the electronics in the world. You know how cool it was in the original film, when he specifically left hospitals and aircraft running to demonstrate his power? Well, here it’s played as this beautiful moment where everyone looks at the rising sun and goes “ooh! Aah!” at the environment (and hey, you’d be grateful too if something stopped this movie from playing) and anyone who watched the original movie is thinking about the planes falling out of the sky and all the people on life support who are crashing and all the refrigerated food that is spoiling so people will go hungry… that’s in addition to the hundreds of thousands who’ve probably already died thanks to Klaatu’s eco-friendly ethnic cleansing, so really, that trigger-happy extra who shot Klaatu in the first act should be given a medal for almost saving the day.
And then he leaves with his little “shape up, humanity!” message, having made it incalculably harder for humanity to survive, let alone help the environment. So I want a sequel where humanity has a massive military build-up and kicks Klaatu’s little green ass for all the trouble he’s caused. I mean, it’s literally like they spliced the malevolent aliens from Independence Day into the more-or-less benevolent alien storyline of TDTESS.
And there’s other weird stuff they keep from the original with no rhyme or reason. Like, Klaatu wants to speak to the UN for a while before he decides “fuck it, kill all humans.” Just totally random. And they keep the scene where he visits the professor and corrects a math equation on a chalkboard (do cutting-edge physicists really still use chalkboards in 2008?). Now, in the original that’s Michael Rennie and Sam Jaffe. Here, it’s Keanu Reeves and John Cleese.
That’s right. The movie actually implied Keanu Reeves is smarter than John Cleese.
Yeah, uh-huh, I checked and I didn’t see John Cleese in the cast of Constantine, so shut up, movie.
It’s like no one behind the camera had the slightest clue about the significance of the original movie or how interesting its ideas were, so they put on this sixth-grade play and didn’t realize that by their own movie’s plot, all the big evil Bush administration’s paranoia was totally justified! And Jennifer Connolly’s character, she’s practically an alien collaborator. If she’d just butted out and let the military Gitmo Klaatu, the entire world would be much better off.
And of course, he’s doing all this because Earth is one of the few planets in the galaxy that can support “complex life,” and as he’s saying this, this big nanomachine swarm is going around eating everything! Why not just set that to eat pollutants? Or, you know, to turn Mars into a nice, fertile planet? Any sci-fi fan has to be thinking this. That’s the real crime. They turned this thoughtful, serious sci-fi movie into a big, dumb, event movie! That’s just… that’s cinematic rape!
You know, they would’ve been better off just re-releasing the original movie to theaters. Would’ve saved them a couple hundred million dollars. They could’ve even paused between scenes to play snippets of An Inconvenient Truth, that must’ve been what the screenwriters were doing when they weren’t taking bong hits.
They don't even have Klaatu Barada Nikto in there!
*Seeing Emma use her diamond power makes me really want to write an Emma Frost/Edward Cullen fic.
Edward: I cannot express my all-encompassing love for you, my sweet, until we are bound in eternal matrimony?
Emma: Yeah, okay.
**And, and after X3, it looks like the only way for the boosting of Wolverine's character to go up is to have an entire superteam put together to support him and an entire cottage industry to create him.
So why'd I go see it? Well, first off, I work at a theater, so free tickets. And second, the trailer for Wolverine was in front of it*. Why did I know the trailer for Wolverine** was in front of it? Because they advertised the trailer in the trailer for TDTESS. That's how you know it's quality. "We made this movie full of good actors, Keanu Reeves, top-notch special effects, and writing, so come see it!... for a glimpse at another movie made by an entirely different group of people." That's fucking confidence in your product right there!
You know who I feel sorry for? The ILM guys. You know they're geeks, probably got Gort action figures in their cubicles, and then they have to do the CGI for Gort slaughtering people and Keanu Reeves raking up a body count.
That's right, Klaatu has a body count. He talks with James Hong, who is this other deep-cover alien who has been living among us and actually started a family, but then he says "Kill 'em all... except I'll stay here and die too, with my family, who I love despite my genocidal hatred of the human race." Even James Hong can't make that shit work. How can anyone watch that scene and not think "man, these aliens are douches"? Did they screen this for anyone?
So Klaatu decides "time to kill all humans!" and he starts up Gort, which turns into this gray goo swarm which starts killing everyone. But it's okay, because it's only mean soldiers with Southern accents. Oh, and a trucker. But they probably had a big carbon footprint, so they had it coming.
I need a beer. God, if we keep showing movies like this, I'm gonna have to find a way for my theater to start serving alcohol. Hell, maybe we could make some hash brownies, get a Danish coffeehouse going. I didn’t need it to sit through The Punisher: War Zone, but this shit needs some serious medication to get through.
Like, who wrote this? Humans? Because you’d think they’d have some awareness of human nature, if they were humans. I think I could make a strong case for the Script-o-matic 5000 turning this out during some Brazil type malfunction. The female lead, Helen, is a single mother (of course. And I know, that was all in the original movie, but they take all the sensitivity of that subplot and they replace it with this cliched, saccharine garbage about a bratty kid reconciling with his harried adult) and her little kid has this “you’re not my real mommy!” complex going because his father died in Iraq and she’s just his stepmom. As you will. So you might think this kid would be a little sensitive to the deaths of US servicemen. I mean, being human and all.
So he watches while Klaatu blows away two Army helicopters (he’s supposed to be defending himself, but throughout the film he has more superpowers than pre-Crisis Superman, so I can’t see why he can’t nonlethally dispatch the mean nasty soldiers… oh, wait, I forgot, PRETTY ‘SPLOSIONS!) and then they start to bond! He’s all “I’m lost, can you take me home?” The guy just killed some of your dad’s classmates! Kick him in the shin or something! Go for the balls!
Okay, so the world is ending and all the cities have been conveniently evacuated so we can get some “crowd-pleasing” destruction while we wait for Will Smith to punch out this clearly psychopathic supervillain. But instead, Klaatu sees Helen and her kid have a touching reconciliation and sees the beauty of humanity and you just know Keanu Reeves acts the hell out of that. So he wanders into the Gort swarm, which has previously gobbled up 18-wheelers in three seconds, yet here it barely ruffles his suit, and he heroically sacrifices himself to save the world. From the destruction he directly and intentionally caused.
It’s kinda like Hitler heroically throwing himself into an Auschwitz gas chamber to save the Jews. Yeah, nice timing, Adolf.
And somehow, his anti-heroic sacrifice turns off all the electronics in the world. You know how cool it was in the original film, when he specifically left hospitals and aircraft running to demonstrate his power? Well, here it’s played as this beautiful moment where everyone looks at the rising sun and goes “ooh! Aah!” at the environment (and hey, you’d be grateful too if something stopped this movie from playing) and anyone who watched the original movie is thinking about the planes falling out of the sky and all the people on life support who are crashing and all the refrigerated food that is spoiling so people will go hungry… that’s in addition to the hundreds of thousands who’ve probably already died thanks to Klaatu’s eco-friendly ethnic cleansing, so really, that trigger-happy extra who shot Klaatu in the first act should be given a medal for almost saving the day.
And then he leaves with his little “shape up, humanity!” message, having made it incalculably harder for humanity to survive, let alone help the environment. So I want a sequel where humanity has a massive military build-up and kicks Klaatu’s little green ass for all the trouble he’s caused. I mean, it’s literally like they spliced the malevolent aliens from Independence Day into the more-or-less benevolent alien storyline of TDTESS.
And there’s other weird stuff they keep from the original with no rhyme or reason. Like, Klaatu wants to speak to the UN for a while before he decides “fuck it, kill all humans.” Just totally random. And they keep the scene where he visits the professor and corrects a math equation on a chalkboard (do cutting-edge physicists really still use chalkboards in 2008?). Now, in the original that’s Michael Rennie and Sam Jaffe. Here, it’s Keanu Reeves and John Cleese.
That’s right. The movie actually implied Keanu Reeves is smarter than John Cleese.
Yeah, uh-huh, I checked and I didn’t see John Cleese in the cast of Constantine, so shut up, movie.
It’s like no one behind the camera had the slightest clue about the significance of the original movie or how interesting its ideas were, so they put on this sixth-grade play and didn’t realize that by their own movie’s plot, all the big evil Bush administration’s paranoia was totally justified! And Jennifer Connolly’s character, she’s practically an alien collaborator. If she’d just butted out and let the military Gitmo Klaatu, the entire world would be much better off.
And of course, he’s doing all this because Earth is one of the few planets in the galaxy that can support “complex life,” and as he’s saying this, this big nanomachine swarm is going around eating everything! Why not just set that to eat pollutants? Or, you know, to turn Mars into a nice, fertile planet? Any sci-fi fan has to be thinking this. That’s the real crime. They turned this thoughtful, serious sci-fi movie into a big, dumb, event movie! That’s just… that’s cinematic rape!
You know, they would’ve been better off just re-releasing the original movie to theaters. Would’ve saved them a couple hundred million dollars. They could’ve even paused between scenes to play snippets of An Inconvenient Truth, that must’ve been what the screenwriters were doing when they weren’t taking bong hits.
They don't even have Klaatu Barada Nikto in there!
*Seeing Emma use her diamond power makes me really want to write an Emma Frost/Edward Cullen fic.
Edward: I cannot express my all-encompassing love for you, my sweet, until we are bound in eternal matrimony?
Emma: Yeah, okay.
**And, and after X3, it looks like the only way for the boosting of Wolverine's character to go up is to have an entire superteam put together to support him and an entire cottage industry to create him.
