Wednesday, May 27, 2009

In case you were thinking of cozying up to a movie

If you happen to rent the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still with Keanu Reeves, Andrew Klavan of Big Hollywood puts you on notice:

...Keanu is sort of a spaceman Al Gore - like Al Gore himself - on an enlightened mission to save the earth from pollution. How is he going to accomplish that? Why, by destroying the human race that causes all the mess, of course. That’s right. He’s going to murder every man, woman and child so the trees won’t die. And he’s the good guy!

It must’ve been really hard for the people who made this film to understand why it underperformed at the box office - as hard as it is for us to understand how they managed to give themselves colonoscopies with their own heads. I mean, they actually thought we were going to root for a creature who was going to slaughter our children in service to An Inconvenient Truth.
Ah, those wacky environmentalists. They purport to love the Earth, but every once in a while, they let the truth slip out, and their truth is that they hate humans. Of course, in a classic case of leftist hypocrisy, they want me and my family to die, but they are not willing to make a similar sacrifice on their part. I'm going to be watching it anyway. I need a good laugh or two.

Good Day to You, Sir

2 comments:

Don, American Idle said...

See the original (l951), much better, movie. In that one the alien was a good guy who just wanted to help. "Klaatu barada nicto."

Darren said...

I rented a "remastered" version at Blockbuster a couple months ago. It looked so good that I almost forgot I was watching it in black&white! I won't buy any other version than that one, but I haven't seen it for sale. I've seen others for sale, but I want that one in particular.

Having said that, allow me to disagree with Don. Klaatu was not a "good guy". He was here essentially to strong-arm Earth. Oh, he was kindly, but you weren't allowed to go against him.

His people created Gort and the boys, robots with an *unrevocable* charter to essentially keep the peace. In other words, the only way to stop violence was the threat of violence. How is that different from what we have today? Only with us, we don't have some paternalistic group making our decisions for us, we as countries handle our own problems.

The original story was very much rooted in the fears of its time, but the message was not one I could support. The Keanu Reeves version was significantly worse, so much so that I'd like to get those 2 hrs and $10 back.